Iga Swiatek won a third Roland Garros title the hard way by proving to herself just how strong she is

WATCH: Roland Garros Women's Final Highlights

Iga Swiatek entered uncharted waters at Roland Garros on Saturday: the third set of a Grand Slam final.

She didn’t seem to like it there. As it began, she banged her palm against her head, railed at her player box, and gave her coaches a sarcastic thumb’s up after a wild ground-stroke miss. How that shot was their fault wasn’t clear, but tennis players, even world No. 1 tennis players, don’t tend to act rationally when they see a major title slipping through their fingers.

Dominance has always been Swiatek’s M.O. in finals. Of the 13 she had won coming into this weekend, 12 had been in straight sets, and most of those were blowouts. After a set and a half in Paris, she was blowing out Karolina Muchova, too. Swiatek led 6-2, 3-0 against her opponent, who was playing her first match of this magnitude. Swiatek hadn’t needed to do anything special to get there. She played solid, consistent tennis, and Muchova, pressing, tried to do too much, and missed too often.

But there’s a danger in playing safely and letting your opponent implode: What do you do if she stops imploding? When Muchova finally relaxed and began to find the corners with her forehand in the second set, Swiatek tried to shift gears with her and take the initiative away, but she couldn’t do it. Ground strokes that normally go for winners went for errors instead. She double-faulted and was broken at 4-4, and missed an easy forehand to be broken at 5-5. She lost the first eight points of the third set, and trailed 0-2

Half an hour earlier, we had been in the midst of a Muchova meltdown. Now it looked like Swiatek was about to unravel before our eyes. Did she have what it took to rescue herself? In a few of her losses this season—to Elena Rybakina in Melbourne and Indian Wells; to Barbora Krejcikova in Dubai—she had fallen behind and failed to fight back.

This time, Swiatek found an answer. With Muchova serving at 2-1 in the third set, she cracked two straight down the line backhand passing-shot winners. You could see that the confidence was back in her swings, and that she had put the blown second set behind her. No more head-banging, no more jawing with her coaches. She didn’t dominate from that point, and Muchova continued to make life difficult with her own powerful forehand and dynamic transitions to net. When Swiatek went down break point at 4-4, it even looked like Muchova might complete the upset.

But Swiatek dug out a difficult backhand and won that point, held with two first serves, and came out firing on her first return point at 5-4. It was finally too much for Muchova, who made two forehand errors and double faulted at match point. Swiatek bent down to the court in tears: She had done it the hard way this time.

“In the third set I didn’t want to have any regrets about the second,” Swiatek said. “I just kind of looked forward, and I said to myself, ‘OK, you know what? I’m just going to give it all.’ No thinking, no like, analyzing. Just play my game, use my intuition, and that really helped.”

For the first time, though, a Grand Slam final of hers could have gone the other way. While Muchova fell just short of the trophy, this was a victory of sorts for her as well. At 26, after an injury-riddled last few years, she had created an opportunity to show off her gracefully versatile game, and she had made the most of it. In the semifinals, she won one of the matches of the year, over Aryna Sabalenka, from 2-5 down in the third, and she nearly replicated that comeback in the final. Afterward, her post-match speech was a hit with the audience, and looked like it had trophy-presenter Chris Evert fighting off tears. As a player and personality, Muchova would be an ideal addition to the WTA elite.

“It’s good for the confidence,” she said of her runner-up run. “It says to me that I’m able to do this, to do this big results. It’s very motivational, and now I feel I can do it and I will for sure try to get there again and to put up a fight for the title on the next stages.”

For Swiatek, who has had more ups and downs in 2023 than she did during her nearly flawless first half of 2022, the win came as something of a relief, and proof of her ability to rise to an occasion, and beat an opponent who wouldn’t go away easily.

“I'm happy that I finished the whole clay court swing so well, and that I kind of survived,” she said with a smile. “I guess I'm never going to kind of doubt my strength again maybe because of that.”