Iga Swiatek, Wimbledon champion – will those words ever seem less astonishing? For all her achievements, until this summer the Pole and lawn tennis have combined much like her favourite recipe of pasta and strawberries – a puzzling concept.
Yet magnificently, here she is. Incongruous ingredients can combine to unexpectedly spectacular effect, it turns out.
Amanda Anisimova’s performance in her debut Grand Slam final was unhappily shredded by nerves.
But Swiatek’s merciless 6-0, 6-0 victory – the first such final scoreline at Wimbledon in 114 years – marked the soaring reappearance of peak Swiatek… on, of all surfaces, grass.
The 24-year-old becomes the first Polish player, man or woman, to be Wimbledon champion. Having never won a grass court title, she has captured the game’s greatest prize with her 100th Grand Slam match win.
It makes her the first woman to win all six of her first Grand Slam finals since Monica Seles in 1992, and the only active player to earn major titles on all three surfaces.
“It seems super surreal,” Swiatek said. “Honestly, I didn’t even dream of this moment because it was way too far. I never really expected this one. My team believed in me more than I did.
“There’s no tournament like this one. I was always anxious because of that. Being on Centre Court felt like huge pressure and a bit too much. But this year I learned to feel comfortable here.”
This match may not have showcased it, but she wasn’t the only player in these Championships to achieve the unforeseen. Anisimova has surged beyond the career marks she realised as a teen prodigy in 2019.
At the beginning of last year, she was ranked world No.442 after taking a seven-month career break from the relentless demands of elite tennis. Last summer she could not advance through Wimbledon Qualifying into the main draw. Now she has become the only player in history to leap from that mark to contesting the singles final just 12 months later.
Alas, from the outset of this first career meeting with Swiatek, her game seemed paralysed by the occasion. All the American’s proven grit – she had beaten No.1 seed Aryna Sabalenka over three sets in the semi-final – was steamrollered by fretful error after edgy mistake as the match unfolded.
“I know I didn’t have enough today but I’m going to keep putting in the work,” Anisimova pledged through tears. “I’ll always believe in myself and I hope to be back here one day.”
So Swiatek is the champion. Very often in elite sport the instinctive response in the moment of victory – the achievement of a goal finally attained after a near-lifetime’s dedication – is simply relief. But for Swiatek it looked very much like plain incredulity.
Perhaps the sheer unlikelihood of this outcome freed her to uncover the secret path towards it. Exit would have been more likely given past performance, so there was nothing to lose by throwing aside all shackles in pursuit of the glorious alternative.
Ironically, her victory here was made possible in part by a comparative slump in form (by her own standards) since her victory at Roland-Garros last year. By reaching no finals until last month, she played fewer matches, allowing earlier preparation on grass, which bore fruit with her runner-up spot at Bad Homburg in June.
Much like Maria Sharapova’s description of her game on clay as resembling “a cow on ice” before she made Roland-Garros her own most successful Grand Slam, Swiatek on grass was until recently like a cat picking its way through snow, lifting its paws away, unsure of the next step.
Yet now, in the place where tennis is played in an English country garden, Iga the cat is not just stretching out luxuriantly on the lawns but practically rolling in the purple and green flowerbeds, alongside the Venus Rosewater Dish.
The champion received £3,000,000 (R73 million) and Anisimova £1,520,000 (R37 million).
