For a woman who once dyed her hair blue for a bet, Beatriz Haddad Maia has proved surprisingly adept at going under the radar.
This summer, while all eyes were on Iga Swiatek and her 37-match winning streak, Haddad Maia quietly compiled an impressive unbeaten run of her own, reeling off a dozen straight victories to claim the first tour-level titles of her career in Nottingham and Birmingham.
That sequence, the best on grass courts since Serena Williams notched up 20 consecutive wins at Wimbledon between 2015 and 2018, lifted the 26-year-old into the top 30 for the first time. The best female player to emerge from Brazil since Maria Bueno, she has since risen to a new career high of 24th. Beyond the country of her birth, however, recognition has been slow in coming.
On Wednesday, when Swiatek was asked in press about the prospect of facing either Leylah Fernandez or Haddad Maia in the next round, the conversation was directed firmly towards the home star. Haddad Maia barely received a mention. Yet she dismissed the 13th-seeded Canadian in straight sets and told the crowd afterwards that she was sorry. She hoped they would cheer for her against Swiatek, she said, but acknowledged she would probably play second fiddle again. No matter; she promised to try her best.
As Swiatek discovered, Haddad Maia’s best is formidable. Quick, powerful and possessed of a deadly southpaw serve and weighty forehand, her game is underpinned by an all-court athleticism and burgeoning self-belief that proved too much for the Polish world No 1.
In bright, blustery conditions, Swiatek found her best form elusive, falling to a second defeat in three matches as Haddad Maia secured the biggest win of her career 6-4, 3-6, 7-5.
“It’s a special moment,” said the Brazilian, who will face Belinda Bencic, a 6-1, 6-3 winner over eighth seed Garbiñe Muguruza, in the quarter-finals. “It’s not always easy to beat the No 1 in the world on a huge stage and against all the crowd. And I think I passed through very tough moments through my career to live this moment.
“I have already four surgeries, and I’m only 26 years old. So when I have special moments, I try to enjoy. Because sometimes we think, ‘Oh, no, I’m not that happy.’
“But the truth is that I worked for like 15 years to live this moment, to live this dream. I worked a lot. So I feel proud of myself.”
Haddad Maia certainly put in the hard miles against Swiatek. At 6ft 1in, the Brazilian cuts an imposing figure. Her physical presence is frequently reinforced by a fierce grunt, and her aggressive intent was evident as she moved inside the baseline to threaten the top seed’s second serve. Caroline Garcia employed a similar tactic to defeat Swiatek at last month’s Poland Open, and here the Pole once again looked rushed and unsettled, struggling to establish a rhythm from the baseline in the face of her opponent’s boldness. Swiatek was not helped by a swirling wind that made it “impossible to play from one side” according to Simona Halep, who earlier defeated Switzerland’s Jil Teichmann in straight sets.
Haddad Maia missed an early break point by overpressing on a return, but in the fifth game her aggression reaped dividends. She drilled a ferocious winner off a second serve to reach deuce, and Swiatek promptly imploded, sending a forehand wildly long before double faulting. With Haddad Maia intelligently directing the majority of her serves down the centre, limiting the Pole’s ability to generate angles and deploy her destructive forehand return from the deuce court, the breakthrough was sufficient to secure the first set.
“I think at the beginning I struggled to find my rhythm on the court,” said Swiatek. “Probably because, you know, she’s a lefty and I had a hard time adjusting to her serve. Plus, the wind. I think without the wind I would manage. But it was pretty crazy out there.”
It got crazier still at the start of the second set, where Swiatek was forced to battle long and hard before surviving an epic service game that featured nine deuces and five break points. Survive she did, though, and when she finally made a breakthrough against Haddad Maia’s serve in the sixth game, and went on to level at a set all, she looked poised to navigate a path to the quarter-finals.
An early break in the decider reinforced that impression, but Haddad Maia showed steely resolve. Swiatek was visibly irritated when she immediately relinquished the initiative, and soon found herself in an even deeper hole at 4-2 down. She fought tigerishly to level again, saving a match point with an ace at 4-5, and chants of “Iga! Iga! Iga!” were soon rolling down from the stands.
So much for the underdog. Yet Haddad Maia has long since become accustomed to dealing with adversity. At the age of 14, she left her home in São Paulo to live alone in Santa Catarina, where she trained at the academy of Larri Passos, the former coach of Gustavo Kuerten. At 15, she had the first of two bouts of surgery on her back. At 19, Haddad Maia went under the knife again after injuring her shoulder in an on-court fall, while in 2020 she underwent an operation on her hand after she was diagnosed with a benign tumour. By then, she had also received a 10-month suspension from tennis after failing a doping test caused by the consumption of contaminated supplements. In short, she was not about to be undone by a partisan crowd.
As Swiatek served to stay in the match for a second time, Haddad Maia fired a blazing forehand winner before stabbing away a short ball in the forecourt. Two more match points followed, both of which Swiatek staved off, but when a fourth came along she drilled one last forehand wide to suffer only her third defeat since February.
“Thanks everybody for coming and cheering today,” said Haddad Maia. “I had two days the crowd against me, so I hope the next round you guys cheer for me please.”
If she continues in this vein, they will have no choice. No longer flying under the radar, Haddad Maia is becoming impossible to ignore.