Winning Words at Wimbledon

After Iga Swiatek's dominant final performance, read in-depth interviews with three core members of her winning team.

WIMBLEDON, England — It’s never a good omen during a major final when you hear someone say “Zvereva.”

When she was blanked 6-0, 6-0 on Saturday at Wimbledon, Amanda Anisimova became the first player since Natalia Zvereva at the 1988 French Open not to win a game in a major singles final. Surely, therefore, many of the pieces written about this match will focus on how and why Anisimova fell so short of making it a competitive final.

But what gets missed too often in the mentions of Zvereva’s infamous loss is what a historically amazing her opponent she faced on that day. Zvereva lost that 34-minute final to a peaking Steffi Graf. Graf, an eventual 22-time major champion, was in the midst of an all-time-great season in 1988, completing the only true calendar-year singles Grand Slam on either tour in the last 50 years, and adding a gold medal to boot.¹

And while her form in earlier stages of this season weren’t up to her normal standards, there’s no doubt Iga Swiatek is a generational great as well. With her first Wimbledon win becoming her sixth major title on Saturday, 24-year-old Swiatek has won more major singles titles than any man or woman born after Novak Djokovic.

Iga Swiatek shows off the newest addition to her six pack. (Photo by John Walton / PA Images / Alamy)

And, until seven-time champ Venus Williams makes a comeback to competition in Washington later this month (more on that here at Bounces when it happens), Swiatek’s six majors also are the most among any active player in women’s tennis.

Sure, 6-0, 6-0 is an extreme scoreline, but it’s within the established normal range for Swiatek, who is a famously great closer in tournaments. Looking at her dominant 23-5 record in tour-level finals, 17 of those 23 wins came by Swiatek conceding five or fewer games in the final.

So with that preeminence in mind, I thought I’d focus on Iga Swiatek today, and with a specific eye to her much-scrutinized team.

When I asked Swiatek in her post-win press conference about the vindication this 57-minute shutout win would provide her and her team amid all the criticism and scrutiny they have faced, she responded forcefully, particularly regarding domestic dissatisfaction in Poland.

Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: There's been a lot of conversation or doubts about you and your game in the last year or so, and criticism of you or your team. What kind of a statement do you think it is to win Wimbledon—at all? And then to do it 6-0, 6-0 in the final, seems like a very loud answer to any sort of questions about anything?

IGA SWIATEK: Well, honestly, the thing is that we, as public people and as athletes, we can't really react to everything that's going on. We’ve got to focus on ourselves.

Obviously sometimes it's easier to do that; sometimes it's harder. And for sure the past months, how the media sometimes described me—and I got to say unfortunately Polish media, how they treated me and my team—it wasn't really pleasant.

I hope they will just leave me alone and let me do my job, because obviously you can see that we know what we are doing, and I have the best people around me. I have already proved a lot. I know people want more and more, but it's my own process and my own life and my own career.

Hopefully I'm going to have a freedom from them, as well, to let me do my job the way I want it.

So in this edition of Bounces, I’m delighted to bring subscribers three one-on-one interviews with the core members of Iga Swiatek’s team, the first three people she hugged upon reaching her box in Centre Court on Saturday: her coach Wim Fissette, her performance psychologist Daria Abramowicz, and her strength-and-conditioning-coach-slash-physiotherapist Maciej Ryszczuk.

Three one-on-one interviews with three core folks, all of whom are great talkers, pretty exciting stuff!

To read these three one-on-one interviews with members of the winning Wimbledon team, totaling more than 4,000 words, please become a paying subscriber to Bounces! You’ll unlock magazines worth of other exclusive Wimbledon content, too! Thanks! -Ben