Iga Swiatek explains why she prefers to ‘stay away’ from the Internet and how she manages expectations

Iga Swiatek’s rise to the top of women’s tennis has resulted in a lot of unwanted attention and expectations – especially in her home country of Poland – but the world No 1 is slowly but surely learning to deal with these pressures.

Aged just 22, Swiatek has won 19 WTA titles – including four Grand Slams – and she is already in the top 10 for most weeks spent at the top of the WTA Rankings as she is currently on 99 weeks.

Her dominance over the past two years has also increased the pressure on her to constantly deliver with some people believing she should win every tournament she enters.

As if those pressures are not enough, Swiatek also has to deal with Internet trolls.

So how does she manage it all?

“It’s pretty easy for me to cut off all these things that are, like, screaming these things, like social media or everything,” the Pole said. “During the tournaments, I try to not go there too much. I’m just posting my stuff and not really going on Twitter or Instagram.

“Actually at the beginning I kind of had to force myself to do it. Now it feels comfortable. Now there are actually so many things that I really don’t understand on the Internet that are weird and not really true, it’s better for me to stay away from it a little bit.

“In terms of the expectations from the outside, that’s it. But I have my expectations. I would say if I feel like I didn’t manage expectations well overall, it’s because I didn’t manage my expectations. The ones from the outside, they really don’t matter that much because I made huge work to manage it and to not really care about them.

“Still sometimes it hits you, especially when you’re tired and you know you did your best, but still people are scrutinising you. They don’t know the full truth, what’s going on off the court, as well. Sometimes it’s not easy.

“I already kind of understand how the world works, and I’m not expecting that it’s going to change. For sure it would be nice if people remember that we’re still human. Yeah, it’s not possible to win every tournament.”

Being at the top and having seen it all and done it all means Swiatek would have a lot to write about her fortunes and life on and off the court if she was to publish an autobiography about the past few years.

“Probably this book would have been 600 pages, so… Hard to answer that,” she said.

“I would just write how I’m proud of my progress and everything in terms of how I handled all the different challenges during my career.

“Everything happened so quickly. I sometimes needed to catch up with my life, to have balance and also be able to do all these obligations well, keep a nice shape on court.

“I would just say how proud I am of that. I think I did a pretty good job at that.”