A shift from slow to fast courts takes Iga Swiatek on Cincinnati Open roller-coaster

Iga Swiatek thought she was in the right place to find her equilibrium again.

The WTA’s No. 1 player had spent the last three months traveling through the noisy cities of Europe, experiencing some of the highest of highs and lowest of lows in her career. After winning in Madrid, Rome, and Paris back-to-back-to-back, she lost early at Wimbledon, and was denied what had seemed a sure-fire Olympic gold medal. But she bounced back quickly enough from that disappointment to bring a bronze back to Poland.

Mason, an exurb of 36,000 spread out across the wide, flat spaces of western Ohio, seemed to offer the peace and quiet she needed to block everything—other than her game—out of her mind.

“I literally felt after the Olympics that I need to kind of reset and also just focus on getting my technique back together and just grinding on court,” Swiatek said as the Cincinnati Open began this week. “Here’s the perfect place to do it. It feels a little bit less crazy.”

For 50 or so minutes, it looked as if Swiatek had found the perfect refuge in Mason. She won the first set over 69th-ranked Varvara Gracheva 6-0. She lost eight points, hit 15 winners to zero for Gracheva, and was pushed to deuce just once. Swiatek’s serve was bending out of her opponent’s reach, and her forehand was diving into the corners. Gracheva made the mistake of hitting the ball back into Swiatek’s forehand side over the over, to the point where Iga finally seemed to run around it to hit a backhand, just to give herself some practice from that side. All of the glitches in her game had been been smoothed out.

That pattern continued until Swiatek led, 5-2, 15-40, double match point on Gracheva’s serve. There was absolutely no reason to think the overmatched and overpowered Gracheva would mount any sort of comeback, or that Swiatek would feel any sort of nerves. But somehow those two things both happened, simultaneously.

Swiatek misfired on the match points, and Gracheva finally loosened up. After 25 winners from Swiatek, Gracheva hit her first one of the night to hold. Then she hit another to break for 4-5. By the time they got to a tiebreaker, the roles had been fully reversed: Gracheva was taking the initiative with depth and pace, while Swiatek was on her back foot, swinging tentatively and shanking balls wide and long. The last of those  errors gave Gracheva the set, 10-8 in the tiebreaker. It was hard to remember, or imagine, a more unlikely comeback.

“It wasn’t easy to finish in the second set,” Swiatek said afterward. “I think Varvara played with more freedom…and I kinda backed out.”

“I probably started playing less intense. That was frustrating, because I didn’t feel like I changed anything, but sometimes it happens.

In the third set, Swiatek said she used “help from the box”—her player’s box—to settle down and reset her tactics. The match turned again with with Gracheva serving at 2-2, 30-30. Swiatek nearly smothered another forehand into the net, but the ball found its way over, and she ended up finishing the point with a much more confident forehand swing. Swiatek seemed to take heart from that fortunate turn of events, found her range again, and ran out a 6-0, 6-7 (8), 6-2 win.

“I’m happy in the third I could be more proactive again. I knew I had my game to win because I had match points…I just tried to look forward and use what I learned from the first set.”

There are two very different takeaways from Swiatek’s first hard-court match since April.

On the plus side, as we saw in the first set, she can execute anything she wants on hard courts, the same way she can on clay. And her serve, retooled this season, is a bail-out weapon in a way that it wasn’t when she lost here, and at the US Open, last summer.

On the minus side, even when she’s rolling, nerves can catch up to her at the finish line, and when she’s challenged and rushed, errors can flow.

Swiatek, as all good players do, chose to concentrate on the positive, citing the quick move from slow red clay in Paris to one of the faster hard courts on tour in Cincy.

“Here the transition is probably the hardest, from the slowest surface to the fastest surface,” she said. “That’s why I’m still happy with my performance.

She’s still happy to be in quiet Ohio, too, where she can take her game “step by step.” The next step will come against Marta Kostyuk in the third round.