By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Friday June 6, 2025
Paris – Iga Swiatek’s remarkable 26-match winning streak came to an end on Thursday in Paris, as she fell to World No.1 Aryna Sabalenka in three sets.
It was anybody’s match until Sabalenka ran away with the decider and handed Swiatek a taste of her own medicine – a bagel.
Swiatek says her intensity dropped every so slightly and that gave Sabalenka the window to crash through.
“I think I lost my intensity a bit, and she just played pretty strong, as in the first set, but I didn’t react to that well and just couldn’t push back,” she told reporters. “It’s just me playing maybe, like, really five percent faster or with more spin.”
The Pole was bidding to become the first woman in Open Era history to win four consecutive titles at Roland-Garros, but she couldn’t handle the intensity and power of Sabalenka down the stretch. She drops to 40-3 lifetime on the terre battue of Paris in non-Olympic competitions.
Swiatek says that she didn’t drop her level a great deal, but it was enough to allow Sabalenka to thrive.
“It’s not like a huge difference, but at this level when you play against the top players, you’re going to feel the difference. She came on pretty strongly in the third set and just went for it, and then the set went pretty quickly.
“I think I didn’t have much time to reset that again like I did at the beginning of the second set. I came back from, what, 4-1 or 3-1 or 3-0 in first. Doing that second time for sure would be hard, but she played, like she didn’t doubt. She just went for it, and that’s what I mean about intensity.
Swiatek flipped the script temporarily after falling behind early in the opening set. She was able to stretch rallies and play more on her terms late in the first and in the second. But credit Sabalenka for imposing herself ruthlessly in the decider. She didn’t make a single unforced error in the set.
She also flattened out her groundstrokes significantly, as she aimed to rush Swiatek at her baseline. TNT reported that her spin rate was down over 25 percent from her average in her first five matches. We’re thinking her analytics team played a role in Sabalenka’s tactics, but credit the Belarusian for having the capacity to make that significant change to her tactic.
“Especially at the beginning of the match, she played as hard as possible, and pretty risky,” Swiatek said. “So it was just hard to get into any rally. And then, I was able to do that, so the game wasn’t just like serve and one shot or return and one shot, and I could build a rally a little bit. “But in the third set I feel like we kind of came back to what happened in the first, and she for sure used her chances, and I didn’t really keep up what I was doing in the second set.”
