Iga Swiatek’s secrets to success revealed, from nature to structure and sleep

Iga Swiatek wears her heart on her sleeve – and it’s no secret. When she sealed the title in Rome last week, she collapsed to her knees with emotion and then jogged to the net to shake hands with her beaten opponent Ons Jabeur.

“Don’t cry,” Jabeur told her.

Swiatek’s reputation preceded her. After reaching the quarter-finals of the Australian Open earlier this year, she said: “A week without crying is not a week.” So it’s no surprise that she is open to ideas when it comes to managing mental health.

It does not get in the way of her tennis though: she is on a 28-match unbeaten streak, has won her last five tournaments at a canter and is a red-hot favourite to win the French Open that starts on Sunday. Her secret? Well, it might not be her only one but she is one of the few professional players to travel with a full-time “performance psychologist”.

Daria Abramowicz has been at Swiatek’s side for more than two years, helping her manage the gruelling schedule of professional tennis as well as her spectacular accession to the top of the global game at such a young age: she was just 19 when she won the French Open in 2020.

 

Abramowicz’s exact work is, by its nature, shrouded in confidentiality, although there are some things she is happy to share. For one thing, Team Swiatek places a high value on green space and nature as a relaxation aid.

“Every single tournament has its specifics,” Abramowicz tells me.

“In Rome, it was pretty tough because it’s a little bit harder to contact with nature here, but at other tournaments, we have more access to it.”

Roland Garros is well situated in that regard. It sits on the edge of the 59-acre Bois de Boulogne, a park that was given up to the Parisian public by Napoleon III in 1852.

A wander through the woods is not to everyone’s taste, but finding a way to decompress during a tennis tournament is of growing importance to elite athletes.

“It started after Rio 2016 where Michael Phelps started to talk openly about mental health, not only sports psychology in terms of optimising the potential and using some sort of tools to perform better but also mental health,” she adds.

“In the next cycle, before Tokyo 2021 and in Tokyo, it was much appreciated and it was very visible how different the approach became. But it’s changing constantly, and I think that it will stay with us.”

Swiatek’s major sponsor ASICS wants to make sure that it does. The sports equipment suppliers have moved to make funding mental health support part of all their sponsorship contracts with athletes.

It is something many already devote time and resources to, and tennis in particular asks a lot of its top players.

“Tennis is a sport of breaks and pauses,” Abramowicz says.

“So you have the pause between points, between games, between sets, and then between matches.”

A grand slam intensifies those pauses, with a day’s break between every match, a time in which players have often allowed themselves to get nervous and tense for the biggest contests of their lives.

The Team Swiatek coping mechanism centres around trying to view the changes in format as a positive, rather than a negative.

“[It’s about] trying to be able to use that time wisely to have more days to recover between matches. For example, there is less fuss with scheduling, less challenge with the scheduling, going to sleep late, waking up early and stuff.

“It might just make a player think about the match more, but still, that’s the way how it works, and the only constructive and proper way to manage that is to be able to think about it and act as if it’s a resource, not a burden.”

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Pressure too, they say, is a privilege.

Chris Evert, an 18-time grand slam winner, knows a bit about pressure but reckons she had it far easier when she turned professional in 1972.

“It’s social media has put it on another level,” Evert says ahead of a stint working as a pundit for Discovery Eurosport at the French Open.

“Then there’s big endorsements, there’s big money in the game now, that creates more stress and I think more anxiety and expectations.

“You win a few tournaments, you win some grand slams – and everybody expects so much more of you.”

That only ratchets up when you win 28 matches in a row, and everyone in the world is wondering how long you can keep going.

“I’d say that the pressure is not a little but it’s enormous now,” Abramowicz agrees.

“Because, in every single interview, every single time there is this mention about the streak and [how] it affects Iga potentially in one way or another.

“We always try to use this and turn this out in a positive way, in terms of being a resource, a source of strength and resilience.”

As if to prove her psychologist’s point, the first questioner to Swiatek in her pre-French Open press conference asked the world No 1 to discuss the mental challenge of arriving at a grand slam on such a hot streak.

“I guess we’re gonna see if everything I have been doing before is going to be enough. But I have positive thoughts,” Swiatek said.

“A couple of times during all these tournaments I was already stressed about that, and I was able to work through it and do a really good job by just focusing on tennis.”

It’s three months since she lost. You would probably have to concede her focus is just fine.