By Richard Pagliaro | @Tennis_Now | Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Photo credit: Brad Penner/US Open/USTA
NEW YORK—Iga Swiatek's competitive engine helps drive the WTA's popularity.
World No. 1 Swiatek restated her criticism of a crammed WTA calendar. The Tour schedule is a crazy train and players need to schedule more stops, Swiatek said today.
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The 2022 US Open champion Swiatek withstood the jitters saving three set points before winning the final five points of the tiebreak in subduing lucky loser Kamilla Rakhimova 6-4, 7-6(6) in her US Open first round on Arthur Ashe Stadium today.
Afterward, Swiatek said players are feeling the squeeze and asserted it "would be easy to fix" for the WTA, but they've already committed to tournaments.
"Well, it would be easy to fix it for people that are in charge, but they already made plenty of decisions and they promised so many things to tournaments, WTA, for example, that, you know, it would mean for them to change their mind, which is tricky, because it's business," Swiatek said. "But I think players are aware that this is crazy what's going on, and the schedule is really tough.
"I spoke about it in Cincinnati, for example, and there are people saying that, oh, I don't have to play so many tournaments, but truth, like the fact is that we have so many mandatory tournaments that we literally need to, you know, show up and we don't have time to, like, work on stuff or, like believe peacefully, because from one tournament we're going straight to another."
The 23-year-old Swiatek has already posted a 54-7 record on the season with much more tennis to be played. Swiatek's critical calendar comments in Cincinnati prompted former No. 1 Yevgeny Kafelnikov to rip her as a chronic complainer on social media.
“Is someone pushing you to play,” he wrote. “All you fricking do is complain!! I’ll tell you what you deserve! You deserve to get paid a lot less than you do now!! How about that??”
Kafelnikov, who routinely led the ATP in combined matches played (singles and doubles), said stars have an obligation to support the tour.
However, Swiatek says while it's not healthy for the tour to continue to push players in such a demanding schedule, but concludes players "don't have much influence on what's going on."
"And this is the case for, like, we don't even have, you know, time until the end of the year, because literally the first tournament starts on 29th of December. So yeah, the season is, for sure, too long," Swiatek said. "I think it needs to be changed, because also, I think it's going to be better for fans. Because they're not going to see their favorite players, like, pull out or getting injured so much, I think.
"And we can present better quality, I would say. I mean, we could. But yeah, as I said at the beginning, I saw from last year that we don't have much influence on what's going on, you know, upstairs, and basically these rules have been changed without us even knowing about them, you know."