Iga Swiatek Makes a Change at the Top

Sometimes being the best isn't good enough, as WTA No. 1 Iga Swiatek decides by parting with longtime coach Tomasz Wiktorowski.

As the quarterfinals wrapped up at the China Open in Beijing, Friday’s biggest tennis news was made on the opposite side of the globe by top-ranked Iga Swiatek. Swiatek, who was the reigning champion in Beijing but has skipped the China swing of the tour entirely, announced she had ended her partnership with coach Tomasz Wiktorowski after three hugely successful years together.

Iga Swiatek and Tomasz Wiktorowski at the 2023 U.S. Open (photo by Hameltion)

Here’s the statement Swiatek put on Instagram Friday:

What did Swiatek and Wiktorowski achieve together?

A whole lot! Starting together just before the 2022 season, Wiktorowski helped transform Swiatek into a world-beater like the tour hadn’t seen since peak Serena Williams, reeling off tournament wins and earning a reputation for ruthless scorelines full of “bakery” sets, 6-0 and 6-1.

Swiatek ascended to the No. 1 ranking abruptly in April 2022 when Ash Barty’s retirement vacated the top spot, but Swiatek immediately proved her worthiness and brought a hegemonic heft to the throne, running a win streak across continents and surfaces that topped out at 37 matches.

Overall Swiatek won four majors with Wiktorowski, had a win-loss record of 194-28 (87.4 percent), and had an especially incredible 20-3 record in finals.¹ Under Wiktorowski, Swiatek transformed from a one-time Slam champ to a generational great, a Hall of Fame lock, and a player whose 123 weeks (and counting) at No. 1 has her at 7th all-time, already.

Wiktorowski often didn’t get as much attention in Swiatek’s corner as did her longtime psychologist Daria Abramowicz—perhaps largely due to the novelty of a top player having a near-omnipresent psychologist with them—but Swiatek’s transformation into the best player in the world pretty neatly aligns with Wiktorowski arrival to the team and the strategic clarity he brought to Swiatek’s obvious physical gifts.

From a 2022 profile of Abramowicz and Swiatek’s team that I wrote for Racquet:

Wiktorowski told me the adjustments he had made to Swiatek’s game had been more tactical than technical, working on her ability to change directions with her backhand down-the-line and equilibrating her power inside what he calls an “87 to 92 percent” range.

That sort of fine tuning from Wiktorowski, as well as the mental help she got from Abramowicz and the physical work of longtime physiotherapist Maciej Ryszczuk, honed Swiatek into a meticulously calibrated champion.

Is Swiatek having a bad season?

Not by any normal measurement! Swiatek has a 59-8 record this season (an 88.0 win percentage), including a 21-match win streak that ran from April into July. In addition to winning her fourth Roland Garros title, she’s also won four WTA 1000 tournaments: Doha, Indian Wells, Madrid, and Rome.

Swiatek is still ranked No. 1, and she’s also still No. 1 in the Elo ratings on Tennis Abstract, which are a useful data-driven power rankings metric. Her edge over No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka is narrowing on both ladders, but she’s still ahead.

Swiatek sits atop both the live rankings and the Elo ratings.

The disappointments in this 2024 season have come at the majors and in the last few months. Though she triumphed at Roland Garros (after narrowly surviving Naomi Osaka in the second round), she lost in the third rounds of the Australian Open and Wimbledon, and in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. Since winning the 2022 U.S. Open, Swiatek has only reached the semifinals of at Roland Garros across the last two seasons of majors, going 2-for-8, while her rival Sabalenka has gone 6-for-8 at making semifinals over the same stretch.

The enormous inflection point on Swiatek’s season was her loss in the Olympic semifinals to Zheng Qinwen, the eventual gold medalist. Swiatek was considered a prohibitive pre-event favorite to win gold, especially since the Paris Olympics were hosting the tennis at her beloved Roland Garros. That weight of expectation—both internal and from a raft of new sponsors who’d made her one of the faces of this Olympiad—ultimately smothered her. Swiatek recovered enough to win the bronze medal match, but she still seemed drained when the tour shifted to American hardcourts, losing to Sabalenka in the Cincinnati semifinals and Jessica Pegula in the U.S. Open quarterfinals.

Swiatek hasn’t played since New York; she pulled out of both WTA 1000 events she had entered in China, Beijing and Wuhan, which hopefully gave her the time she needed to recuperate from this uniquely grueling stretch of her career. Her next tournament is set to be the WTA Finals in Riyadh, at which she will be defending champion following her dominant run when the event was in Cancun last year.

Is Swiatek changing her coach a surprise?

Sort of? Swiatek is still ranked No. 1, which she has been for 48 straight weeks, and won her fourth major title under Wiktorowski just four months ago at Roland Garros. Those are very enviable markers, and would seem to be enough for job security for most coaches.

This is nowhere near as big a shock, certainly as the last time a WTA No. 1 changed coaches while at the top, which was when Naomi Osaka fired Sascha Bajin just after winning her second consecutive major at the 2019 Australian Open to reach the No. 1 ranking. Osaka’s move, as I reported in my biography of her that came out in earlier this year, was driven not by anything about her tennis but by personal relationship dynamics foremost (Osaka was upset that Bajin had not been honest about his off-court relationship with another WTA player).

But while Osaka’s ouster of Bajin was a complete ouster was a complete blindside for the public, there had been some growing whispers about Swiatek’s team in recent months. I’ve been interviewed by Polish media several times in the last few months (in large part because my book, Naomi Osaka, got its first foreign-language edition in Polish over the summer, last plug I promise), and Polish reporters were increasingly antsy about Swiatek and her results as the year dragged on, frequently asking what changes I thought Swiatek needed to make. I mostly preached patience in my answers; I did not think Wiktorowski or anyone else in Swiatek’s team was obviously overdue to be dropped, but also it’s difficult to know what all of the internal dynamics and chemistry have been behind closed doors in recent months that might have made a change feel necessary.

Swiatek is the third major star of women’s tennis to make a coaching change in the weeks since the U.S. Open, following Osaka parting with Wim Fissette and Coco Gauff ending her partnership with Brad Gilbert. All three of these tandems had won at least one major title together, so having all three partnerships end in quick succession is a jolt for the tour.

The end of the Swiatek-Witkorowski tandem is the most surprising of the bunch, but all three pairings—particularly Gauff and Gilbert—left New York on clear down notes.

Does Swiatek need a non-Polish coach next?

The one indication of her thinking Swiatek gave in her post was that she was “in the middle of first talks with coaches from abroad (non-Polish), because I’m ready to take the next step in my career.”

I was admittedly taken aback by Swiatek’s framing of this, seeming to suggest that she had somehow been holding herself back by keeping her team domestic and that looking abroad was a necessary “next step.” While I am glad she’s considering a broad swath of options for her next hire, I don’t think there was anything inherently provincial about Swiatek having worked with an all-Polish team so far in her career.

Poland is hardly a backwater (it’s an increasingly prosperous European country of 37 million people), and there have been a string of successful players from Poland in recent years on both the ATP and WTA tours, proving that the country’s tennis acumen is world-class. And Tomasz Wiktorowski himself was also an established, world-class coach before working with Swiatek, having coached former WTA No. 2 Agnieszka Radwanska through the best years of her career.

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