Iga Swiatek admits she will treat Cincinnati Open ‘as a practice tournament’
Iga Swiatek has revealed that she will try and take a more laid back approach in Cincinnati, after the Pole admitted to finding the Olympic Games ‘pretty stressful’.
Swiatek has opened up about the mixed feelings that she was having after claiming a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics, despite being the overwhelming favourite heading into the Games.
🥉🇵🇱 After a couple of days I feel ready to sum up this chapter… pic.twitter.com/8PfRVQkKyF
— Iga Świątek (@iga_swiatek) August 6, 2024
The World No.1 was very emotional after losing her semi-final to eventual champion Qinwen Zheng, and now Swiatek has spoken on her time in Paris after having a couple of weeks to reflect.
“It was pretty stressful and it wasn’t easy,” the 23-year-old told press in Cincinnati. “But I’m happy that I could leave Paris with a medal and with a lot of knowledge about myself. The most important thing for me was to learn from this experience.
“I was proud of myself and I was happy that I could deal with all this pressure and still get a medal. It wasn’t like a normal tournament, for sure.”
She added, “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. Here [Cincinnati] is the perfect place to do it. It feels a little bit less crazy, but on the other hand, even before the tournament, there are many people and a lot of fans. So you still feel that it’s an important tournament anyway.”
Swiatek will now turn her attention to the US hard court swing beginning in Cincinnati, where she achieved her best result last year by reaching the semi-finals.
And the five-time major winner has explained why she is ‘taking it easy’ ahead of the WTA 1000 tournament, “I know that the first tournament on hard court is not going to be easy. So I’m going to try to treat it as a practice tournament, but not in a way that I don’t care – more in a way that I want to implement all the stuff that I practiced on. I think it’s the best approach for me now.
“We’re taking it easy, doing everything step by step. For sure, it’s not going to be perfect from the beginning but I had a couple days to really get used to the surface, so I’m trying to do the best job possible every day and entering the court next day knowing I can do something better.”
Swiatek will begin her Cincinnati Open in the second round, after receiving a bye as the top seed, against the winner of Ajla Tomljanovic and Varvara Gracheva.
The pathway for our men’s and women’s top two seeds is set 🏆🔒 pic.twitter.com/sPQPdU8IWb
— Cincinnati Open (@CincyTennis) August 10, 2024
Inside the baseline…
It was clear for everyone to see how stressful Iga Swiatek found the pressure of the Paris Olympics and that really reflected onto her game in the semi-final defeat to Qinwen Zheng. However, it is good to see that Swiatek is looking back on Paris with some perspective after she collected her first Olympic medal at just 23-years-old. The American hard court season seems wide open this year on the women’s side, with no-one particularly standing out on their own, but Swiatek knows how to peak for the US Open like she did back in 2022.
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