Faced with her first major test of the French Open she is so heavily favoured to win, Iga Swiatek embraced the pressure, recovering from a set down to defeat Qinwen Zheng 6-7(5), 6-0, 6-2 and reach the quarter-finals.
The victory means Swiatek has won 32 matches in a row, tied with Justine Henin for the third-longest streak of the 21st century. She has now reached the quarter-finals in each of the last three years.
“I speeded up a little bit my forehand. Maybe that was the solution. But I felt like my mind is a little bit more clear. I was kind of singing songs, and I realised in the first set when I was really focusing on that technical stuff it didn’t really work because I got more and more tense when I couldn’t do that and I couldn’t really prepare to the shot the best way. I was singing in my mind, basically,” said Swiatek. She later said she was singing Dua Lipa.
Zheng, 19, became just the second player to take a set off Swiatek since 15 March, going blow for blow with the No1 across a brutal, physical 87-minute opening set. Afterwards, she suggested that she had been suffering from menstrual cramps: “I got really pained stomach and I try my best, but it’s just, in the second and third set, I couldn’t, I didn’t have power to scream one, ‘Come on’ even. It was really tough.”
She continued: “It’s just girls’ things, you know,” she said. “The first day is always so tough and then I have to do sport and I always have so much pain in the first day. And I couldn’t go against my nature. I wish I can be a man on court, but I cannot in that moment when I say, I really wish I can be man that I don’t have to suffer from this. It’s tough.”
Swiatek will next face Jessica Pegula, the 11th seed, and the second highest-ranked player left in the tournament after herself. Pegula recovered from a set down to defeat Irina Camelia Begu 4-6, 6-2, 6-3. Meanwhile, Daria Kasatkina will face Veronika Kudermetova in the other quarter-final.
