Iga Swiatek Is Baking Hot At French Open After Serving More Bagels

Iga Swiatek was one point away from being 1-5 down to Naomi Osaka in the deciding act of her fourth-round clash on Wednesday. The Pole had just been hammered 6-2 in the previous set and must have felt cooked by the power of the resurgent Japanese. Swiatek simply doesn’t get destroyed like that on her favorite court. Coming back from the brink is what champions do, and this was very much the last chink of the brink.

The World No. 1 found a way to win as Osaka began to doubt herself at the wrong time. It's almost as if the four-time major champion realized the enormity of her performance when it would have been better to carry on regardless. How could she outsmart and outplay the three-time Roland Garros champion on clay? While Osaka faltered, Swiatek flew again and the savage nature of competitive sport was laid out right there. Winning the last point is the only thing that counts in the record book.

The unfortunate Anastasia Potapova knows this all too well. She only won ten in the whole match on Sunday as the defending champion marched into the last eight. Swiatek said she was unaware of the score and only focusing on her own game during the 40-minute destruction. This is the kind of mesmeric mission-based mindset that dominated the scene during her 37-game winning streak in 2022.

That tunnel vision is the most dangerous weapon Swiatek possesses in her kit bag. When she takes out all of the external stuff, including the target on her back in the rankings, there’s just the opponent. This is what she managed to retrieve after regaining top spot from Aryna Sabalenka in November last year. When the end goal is to create and attack rather than defend titles – and she is piling those up this season – then it creates a freedom to go and play without fear. Emotional roller coaster matches are probably not her bag. Having saved herself midweek in extremis, even that box is ticked off.

That ability to completely crush the opponent to love, the worst kind of love on the tennis court, has earned the Warsaw player the moniker of 'bagel queen'. When she beat Karolina Pliskova 6-0 6-0 in the final of the 2021 Italian Open to break into the top 10, Swiatek showed the same innocent ruthlessness that she displayed to the poor Russian.

“I was visualizing that I'm starting that match from the beginning every time. Actually, I did that so well that I didn't even know that it was 6-0 in the first set... The key is just to not to think about it and just, you know, play. Because when you're gonna think about the score, you can actually ruin your mindset and ruin your attitude,” she said after that whitewash of the 2021 Wimbledon runner-up.

When the Pole reached an impressive 100 weeks as World No. 1 back in April, over a quarter of her sets had been won 6-0 in that timeframe. During 2023, she won a bagel set in just under 30 per cent of her matches. That was an astonishing feat and well clear of any contenders and pretenders to her zero-tolerance zone.

To her credit, she has refused to indulge in the ability to wipe the floor with her rivals. It’s not in Swiatek’s nature to be disrespectful to any opponent, especially given the professional distress involved in that scoreline. Think of Roger Federer’s last-ever set on Centre Court against Hubert Hurkacz. It can happen, but it’s rather bad form to indulge in the sheer humiliation.

This time last year, she beat Wang Xinyu in the third round by the same margin. “I want to kind of be respectful to my opponents and you don't see the stuff that is behind the scenes. Sometimes it's not easy to play such matches and sometimes it's not easy also for the opponents. I don't want to talk about the 'bakery'", she insisted.

It’s not the kill that the 23-year-old wants. It’s the focus to do what she does best to dismiss and the ups and downs on the other side of the net. "Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us," wrote Emily Bronte. Naomi Osaka might know what she means this week.