For Jessica Pegula, it always seemed to be the same story. She would work her way into the latter stages of a big event, only to find her path to glory blocked by Iga Swiatek. It happened two years ago, when the Polish world No 1 denied her in the French and US Open quarter-finals, and it happened again last November at the WTA Finals in Cancún, where she was demolished by Swiatek in the title round. In a career punctuated by six grand slam quarter-final losses, they were hardly the only setbacks the late-blooming American suffered. But on the grandest stages, Swiatek, more than any other player, was synonymous with Pegula’s struggle to get results commensurate with her talent.
If ever there was a time and place to alter that narrative, however, it was at this US Open of myriad upsetsand notable American success. And on Wednesday night, the 30-year-old New Yorker did just that, producing a poised, patient and disciplined performance to see off Swiatek in straight sets and reach her first grand slam semi-final. Tellingly, for all her evident joy at emulating the success of her compatriots Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe, whose meeting on Friday will ensure an American presence in a men’s singles final at Flushing Meadows for the first time since 2006, Pegula’s overriding emotion was relief at ending her quarter-final hoodoo.
“I’ve been [to the last eight] so many freaking times, I just kept losing – but to great players, to girls that went on and won the tournament,” said Pegula after her 6-2, 6-4 victory. “So I know everyone keeps asking me about it, but I was like, ‘I don’t know what else to do, I just need to get there again and win the match.’ Thank God I was able to do it and finally – finally! – I can say, ‘Semi-finalist.’”
The foundations for that breakthrough were laid early. With 21 minutes gone, Swiatek had racked up a dozen unforced errors and been broken twice, each time on a double fault. Pegula, meanwhile, was commanding the baseline exchanges, maintaining immaculate length with her flat, powerful groundstrokes, refusing to give ground or be rushed. Tellingly, Swiatek did not hit a single winner in those first four games. By the end of the set, the Pole had put just 36% of her first serves into play and was chattering agitatedly to her team. It was a dream start for Pegula.
“I wanted to come out playing the way I wanted to play,” said Pegula. “I had an idea in my mind of what I learned from the last time I played her at [the WTA] Finals, and [I wanted to] play within myself and then just see where she was at.
“I could tell right away that she was frustrated on the serve, and then I was like, ‘OK.’ I wanted to attack the serve pretty early, but it depends on how she’s serving: am I going to get a lot of second serve looks, am I not? So once I saw that [her serve] wasn’t really working that well, I made it a point to really try and step in and try to keep doing that the entire time.
“I started off playing well, so I just kind of tried to stay within myself and then adjust according to how she was playing.”
With a dismal start behind her, Swiatek began the second set in stronger vein, running Pegula from pillar to post to seal a convincing early hold. But the American world No 6, who has worked hard to improve her movement, remained unperturbed. As Swiatek lapsed back into error, Pegula broke to go ahead again, and although the top seed hit back immediately, there was a palpable lack of confidence about her play, particularly off the forehand. With the ball flying off Swiatek’s strings and Pegula showing some resourceful defensive play, things came to a head in the seventh game. Fighting to raise her level, Swiatek saved two break points but could not fend off a third, drilling a forehand into the alley off a slow, floated slice. There would be no way back.
“It’s never easy to play against Jess,” said Swiatek. “She has a tricky ball, because it’s pretty low and pretty flat. I wouldn’t say she changed a lot, because it’s impossible to change your game style.
“But for sure she was more solid than me and making much less mistakes, so was putting pressure with that. Usually I’m able to push it back, or put pressure on myself, but today I just made too many mistakes.”
From her buggy-whip forehand and mental and physical intensity to her domination at Roland Garros, where she has won four of her five grand slam titles, Swiatek has often been likened to her hero, Rafael Nadal. Over the course of a difficult summer, another point of comparison has become discernible. Just as Nadal used to dominate the clay-court season only to find the tank depleted later in the season, so Swiatek – crowned champion in Madrid, Rome and Paris before suffering unexpected defeats to Yulia Putintseva at Wimbledon and Qinwen Zheng at the Olympics – appears to be paying the price for a successful summer on the red dirt.
Has the Pole hit the wall? Despite her improvement in the second set, this was a startlingly poor display by her standards. Swiatek’s serve, the mainstay of her progress as she advanced to the last eight without dropping a set, largely deserted her, the 23-year-old winning just 56% of points behind her first delivery. By the end of the night, she had committed 41 unforced errors – the same number she made in the opening round against Kamilla Rakhimova, with the crucial difference being that here she managed only a dozen winners, 18 fewer than she conjured against the Russian. It was, as Swiatek acknowledged, too much to overcome.
“I was telling myself that I can still play well from the baseline and I’ve had many tournaments when I didn’t serve well and I managed to win anyway,” said Swiatek. “But I probably didn’t find the right solution, because I couldn’t push on my serve. Also, I wasn’t that solid from the baseline to have a backup like that. You’re not going to win if you make so many mistakes.”
Not against Pegula, at any rate; not with the American in this form. Pegula will now face Karolina Muchova, who underwent wrist surgery in February but returned to the semi-finals for a second straight year with a 6-1, 6-4 win over Beatriz Haddad Maia. Like Pegula, the 28-year-old Czech, unseeded but with talent in abundance, has yet to drop a set. It will be far from straightforward, but it is an opportunity: three weeks ago in Cincinnati, Pegula won the first career meeting between the pair in three sets. A maiden grand slam final could arrive a lot quicker for Pegula than her first semi-final did.