PARIS — Maybe it’s the oddity, for some, of sleeping with a roommate in a glorified dormitory.
Maybe it’s the weight of a shirt with a country’s flag or crest on the sleeve or the chest. Maybe, after toiling each week for ranking points and trophies and prize money, it’s the idea of playing for a priceless medal of near mythic import, while knowing that the chance won’t come around for another four years.
Whatever it is, every time an Olympic tennis tournament rolls around lately, the tennis form joins some behavioral norms in heading off the rails. This is how we end up with a string of Olympic gold medal winners who have never won majors — or had never won one at the time when they got their hands on that medal. Alexander Zverev; Belinda Bencic; Monica Puig; Andy Murray; Elena Dementieva; Nicolas Massu; Lindsay Davenport.
Thursday’s case in point was Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1, who has spent most of the past four years establishing her supremacy on the red clay of Roland Garros. With four French Open titles on her resume, she’d lost just once here since 2020 before running into Zheng Qinwen of China on Court Philippe-Chatrier, on another sticky, steamy day in the French capital.
Swiatek’s status as overwhelming favorite appeared to undo her (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Over the course of 90 minutes, a run of 1149 days, 25 consecutive match wins, and a 47-4 record in sets won evaporated, as Swiatek morphed into the worst version of her tennis self. She scattered balls all about the clay, especially in the tight moments when she usually thrives. She lost 6-2, 7-5 to a player she’d beaten six times straight.
It first sent Swiatek into a bronze medal match Saturday, and then over the edge.
Her eyes hinting at tears and her face still flushed red, matching the color of her Team Poland kit, Swiatek broke down in front of the television cameras an hour after the end of the match and walked straight through the written press area an hour later, refusing to talk about what had unfolded in the early part of the afternoon.
“Sorry, next time,” she said.
She could have been talking to herself, after a run of defeats — and hardly consecutive ones — that all seem cut from the same fabric. Plan A works until it doesn’t. The response to Plan A working is more Plan A. The revving, spitting forehand that she uses to annihilate so many players has all the topspin she needs to play hunker-down, let-it-pass, let-them-peak tennis, but the scarcely believable success that simply mowing opponents down has brought her appears to prevent Swiatek from turning it into a less risky version of itself.
Only against Naomi Osaka, at this year’s French Open, did she appear to figure out that her opponent, who has won four Grand Slam titles herself, simply couldn’t do the paint-the-lines performance all night.
Whether or not this defeat has the gravity required to consider strategic changes, or will instead be put down to the singularity of Olympic tennis, and all that surrounds it, remains to be seen.
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Like many more of the greatest tennis players, Swiatek is the highest form of creature of habit, especially at big tournaments, where she seeks out peace and calm and quiet daily. The ruckus of the Olympic village — even for athletes who aren’t staying there — the pomp of the opening ceremonies and the rules that require walking into microphones before a cool-down and shower, rather than the flipped order of operations at Grand Slam tournaments, all add up to an exercise in disruption.
Then there is the pressure of winning a gold medal for a small country that comes to every Olympic Games with few chances to hang one round its collective neck. Swiatek succumbed to tears on court after losing to Spain’s Paula Badosa the second round of the 2021 Tokyo Games, back when the Pole had just one Grand Slam title to her name. That time, she had managed to collect herself and quickly gained some remove.
“We are also human,” she said.
“Competing at the highest level every week is not easy. Tennis is such a frustrating sport at times, but of course there is nothing to complain about.”
Not so Thursday.
There had even been speculation in the Polish press about whether Swiatek’s father, who rowed for Poland in 1988, had placed undue pressure his daughter to win the Olympic medal, especially gold, that eluded him. Danielle Collins, who had a terse exchange with Swiatek at the net following their quarterfinal match Wednesday evening, even caught some shade.
Collins retired in that match down 4-1 in the third set, then accused Swiatek of being insincere when she expressed sympathy about her injury. It wasn’t clear what justification Collins had for that, or whether she was merely still annoyed with a long bathroom break Swiatek took during the match, or with her stalling on Collins’ serve by holding her racket in the air, a move that her opponents are quickly tiring of.
Collins, who spent much of the second set hyping herself up with huge “come ons” before going quiet in the third, knows the value of momentum and disruption better than most. Swiatek said she had no idea what the situation was about.
Collins’s and Swiatek’s exchange after the American retired was on the stranger side (Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)
Collins’ broadside came 24 hours after another American Emma Navarro, slammed Zheng at the net for reasons that also remain unclear, after Zheng beat her in their three-set battle Tuesday.
“I just told her I didn’t respect her as a competitor,” Navarro said after the match. “I think she goes about things in a pretty cut-throat way. It makes for a locker room that doesn’t have a lot of camaraderie, so it’s tough to face an opponent like that, who I really don’t respect.”
Navarro, it’s worth noting, is hardly the sort of player who goes around popping off on colleagues regularly. Shy and quiet, at least publicly, are the adjectives that often accompany her.
“If she’s not happy about my behavior, she can come and tell me,” Zheng said. “I would like to correct (it) to become a better player and a better person.”
Zheng couldn’t have behaved or performed much better on Thursday against Swiatek.
The sixth seed did what was nearly impossible by beating Swiatek at Roland Garros, becoming only the third player, after Simona Halep and Maria Sakkari, to do so in the previous five years. Zheng, who broke out in January when she blasted her way into the Australian Open final, came back from 0-4 down in the second set after Swiatek started rolling downhill.
Zheng put an end to that by stealing a page from the Coco Gauff, who earned her lone win over Swiatek last summer in Cincinnati by disrupting her with high looping forehands and then pounding returns of the off-speed balls that Swiatek paddled back.
A flurry of errors from Swiatek also helped.
Swiatek’s backhand was unusually volatile (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
Even when, at 1-2 down in the first set, she immediately broke Zheng back to love, Swiatek could not sustain the shift in momentum. Zheng attacked her second serve throughout, consigning Swiatek to winning just four of 15 points behind it, and teasing out double faults as the world No. 1 felt forced to go bigger.
“I’m so happy that I can make this story for China’s tennis, because I always wanted to be one of the athletes who can get a medal for China,” Zheng said.
“Right now I’m one of them but I know the fight is not over,” she added. “I’m really happy. But in the same time, I want to say I’m waiting for war, and of course I made a story already — but I don’t want to stop here.”
Zheng is the first Chinese tennis player to compete for an Olympic gold medal (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Zheng had done little of note since Australia, but not everyone was completely shocked by the result. Karolina Muchova, who along with partner Linda Noskova made the semifinals in doubles, said Zheng had given her fits at a recent clay tournament in Palermo, Italy.
“I knew Iga was going to have a touch match today,” Muchova said after her win. Zheng also pushed Swiatek on the terre battue in 2022, when she took the first set before severe menstrual cramps left her unable to do anything on the court. “I cannot play my tennis, (my) stomach was too painful,” Zheng, then ranked world No. 74, said at the time.
Swiatek will now face either Donna Vekic of Croatia or Anna Karolina Schmiedlova of Slovakia in the bronze medal match, while Zheng will play the winner of their semifinal for Olympic gold.
Gauff, the second seed, went out earlier in the week, succumbing to a questionable judgment call by the chair umpire on a crucial point, as well as her usually steely emotions, perhaps yet another example of the Olympian pressures. Gauff was in tears on the court over the call, which cost her a crucial service break in the second set, yelling that she was being treated unfairly on Court Philippe-Chatrier for the second time in two months.
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It was a pretty off-brand moment for Gauff.
“It’s every four years, So you feel more pressure,” said Jasmine Paolini, a finalist in the two most recent Grand Slams. “The losses here are harder to accept; for me it was hard to accept.”
The men have stayed closer to form this time around. Alcaraz and Djokovic are still alive, but Alexander Zverev of Germany, the defending gold medalist and a finalist at the French Open in June, lost at the hands of Lorenzo Musetti, the rising Italian and Wimbledon semifinalist. Musetti barely made it to Paris in time for his first match after losing in the final of the Umag Open on Saturday night in Croatia, and has now played nine matches in nine days.
“Something unexpected,” Musetti said earlier in the week after that first win.
With tennis and the Olympics, it pretty much always is.
(Top photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)