At Roland Garros, a sensation: Iga Swiatek, she of the 30-match unbeaten streak and five straight titles, failed to win a service game. And not just once. Three times in two sets Swiatek was broken by the powerful 95th-ranked Montenegrin Danka Kovinic, which is just one game less than she had lost in the previous two rounds combined.
It made no difference to the result, of course. Swiatek, the world No 1, eased through to the fourth round with a 6-3, 7-5 victory, just as we all expected she would. Such has been her recent dominance, however, that the merest hint of fallibility comes as something of a shock.
With her 31st win in a row, Swiatek is one step away from equalling the third-longest winning run since the turn of the century, set by Justine Henin in 2008. Should she claim the title for a second time on Saturday, she will draw level with Venus Williams’s record. It has been an astonishing run but, for once, a player who has become accustomed to sweeping all before her was made to earn victory the hard way.
“I felt like she used my power in some moments so I had to adjust a little bit more to what she was playing,” said Swiatek, “and for sure I played a little more smart.
“I changed the tactics in second set a little bit to play less risky, but then I did some mistakes. I lost my breaks. I’m not perfectly happy with that, but overall I’m happy with the performance, and that I came back in the second set.”
The fraught nature of the contest was foreshadowed in Kovinic’s opening service game, a miniature epic in which five break points came and went before Swiatek finally made the breakthrough after 13 minutes. The Pole consolidated her advantage with a love hold, and everything appeared to be falling into a familiar pattern. But at 4-2 came the first hiccup, Swiatek ceding the initiative with a spate of errors. It was a curious lapse from a player who had conceded just 10 points in seven services against Alison Riske in the previous round, but it is not the first time Swiatek has abruptly if temporarily lost rhythm on her forehand in the heat of battle, and normal service was quickly resumed.
Of greater concern to the Pole as she moves into the second week will be the alarming speed with which her game deserted her just as she appeared to be on the brink of another resounding win. Having built a 4-1 lead in the second set, her forehand faltered anew and a 4-1 lead was abruptly erased, 11 straight points slipping through her fingers as her opponent, her confidence surging, made hay. Swinging with abandon and climbing all over Swiatek’s second serve, Kovinic reeled off four successive games, leavening her power with a series of delicious drop shots as she moved within a game of levelling the match.
Then, as sharply as things had gone awry, they clicked back into place. Swiatek reasserted herself on serve. Kovinic sent a forehand into the alley to drop serve. Despite an unusually high tally of 23 unforced errors, the top seed was through to the last 16 for the fourth time in four attempts.
“The matches that I played here, I feel like I was dominating,” said Swiatek, who will play China’s Zheng Qinwen in the fourth round after the injured Alizé Cornet was forced to retire while trailing 6-0, 3-0. “Today maybe at some points I wasn’t.
“It wasn’t surprising, it wasn’t like weird, but for sure it took me longer to kind of come back. That’s why I think I lost these two service games. But overall, you know, I had many tight matches [during the winning streak] in Stuttgart, Rome against Bianca [Andreescu]. It’s not that I forgot how to play these kinds of sets, so it’s okay.”
Swiatek’s path to a second title in three years was eased by the defeat of third seed Paula Badosa, her projected semi-final opponent, who was forced to retire with a calf injury as she trailed Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova 6-3, 2-1.
The Spaniard was followed out of the tournament by seventh seed Aryna Sabalenka, who was beaten 4-6, 6-1, 6-0 by Italy’s Camila Giorgi as the upsets continued in the women’s draw. Swiatek is now the only top-10 player remaining in the draw, a fact to which she will attach no more weight than her incessant stream of victories.
“Thinking about all these stats, it’s not really helpful,” said Swiatek. “Basically, I try to be really strict in terms of my thoughts and try to really focus on some solutions and finding solutions.”
Problems have been rare of late but, as she showed against Kovinic, the 20-year-old has the answers when required.