Coco Gauff cruises past Iga Swiatek to reach Madrid Open final for first time

For Coco Gauff, it was about as good as it gets.

For Iga Świątek, a changeover midway in the second set at the Madrid Open said it all. With Gauff ahead 6-1, 3-0, Świątek draped a towel over her head. She kept it there as she sipped water from an open can. And when she pulled it off to go back on the court, she wiped tears from under her eyes.

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A recovery from there seemed unlikely, especially as Gauff trotted back onto court to close business. The tears continued through the final changeover, before Gauff did to Świątek what Świątek has done to so many others on Europe’s red clay the past five years.

She beat the four-time French Open champion 6-1, 6-1 in a little over an hour at the Caja Magica in Madrid, setting up a final against either world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka or Elina Svitolina of Ukraine.

The win puts Gauff into her first individual final of the season. It also pulls her a click closer in her head-to-head meetings with Świątek, the world No. 2 and the dominant player of the last four seasons. Świątek now leads 11-4, but Gauff has won the last three matches. At one point, Świątek led the series 7-0 over Gauff. It’s 4-4 since then.

Gauff, who played an error-strewn opening match against Dayana Yastremska in which she lost the first set without winning a game, was clinical Thursday. She had just four unforced errors on her forehand and four on the backhand against 18 winners. She won 90 percent of the points she played on her first serve and 69 percent on her second. She converted 5 of 7 break points.

Ultimately, she won 57 points to just 26 for Świątek.

“I was aggressive and I played with margin,” Gauff said on the court after the win. “Maybe her level wasn’t her best, but I think I forced her into some awkward positions.”

Gauff said she told herself she needed to raise her level in the second set. Świątek had lost the first in her quarterfinal match 6-0, but she recovered to win the next two over Australian Open champion Madison Keys.

“At any moment, she can come back and play great tennis,” Gauff said.

Very quickly, it became apparent that was not going to happen.

For Świątek, the defending champion in Madrid, the defeat continues a season that would delight just about anyone on the WTA Tour — but she is not anyone. She has reached the quarterfinals in every tournament she has played, but has yet to play a final. Her defeats this year have largely been to peaking opponents and eventual tournament winners, and on the surface, all the signs of them were present in Spain: a slew of groundstroke errors and a sense of bewilderment against a player competing at a very high level.

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But this was not like those matches. Świątek’s defensive footwork and general movement, which is close to peerless and one of her greatest strengths, was absent. It seemed stiff and stilted throughout the afternoon in a way that it rarely does on clay. Usually, she glides across the court with a lethal combination of ease and speed, sliding into shots but never through them, then hustling back into position and jumping on the first chance to end the point.

Instead, as Gauff belied her recent struggles on her forehand side by whipping the ball up and down into the court and out of her opponent’s easy reach time and again, Świątek looked adrift. She knocked in 70 percent of her first serves but won just 35 percent of those points, figures that are difficult to comprehend for a player at her level.

It was Świątek’s worst loss on clay since 2019, when Simona Halep beat her 6-1, 6-0 at the French Open. At the time, Świątek was ranked 104th and was considering going to college. Halep was the world No. 3 and the defending Roland Garros champion. The following year, Świątek beat Halep in straight sets on her way to her first Roland Garros title.

Świątek must now regroup for the Italian Open in Rome, where she is the defending champion, as she was in Madrid and as she will be at the French Open in Paris.

“She is very talented and can make you run and move you around the court,” Gauff said in her post-match news conference. “I just tried to not do that today, which is what I did all the times that I, or tried to do all the times that I played her. Obviously, I’ve gotten a lot better since maybe our first couple of times playing each other, and obviously the results are showing that.

“Not that she hasn’t gotten better either, obviously she’s doing great, too. I just feel like it’s one of those days you just step on court and everything feels good, and today was that day for me.”

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Świątek never won more than two consecutive points and won just six points on Gauff’s serve in seven games.

“Coco played good, but I think it’s, you know, on me that I didn’t move well,” Swiatek said in her post-match news conference. “I wasn’t ready to play back the shots with heaviness, and, yeah, with that kind of game, like, yeah, it was pretty bad.”

Świątek said her tennis has been on and off throughout the tournament, and she rarely was able to resort to a Plan B. She hasn’t been playing instinctively of late.

“I’ve been forcing myself to go lower, to be more precise with my feet, because it’s not going by itself,” she said. “So hopefully one day it’s going to click, but I’m not expecting anything, I’m just going to try to work on that.”

Świątek’s distress dates back to last summer, following her win at Roland Garros. Since then, her actions haven’t lined up with the words she has used publicly.

She said it was important to excel on the grass of Wimbledon, where she was a junior champion, but has struggled since. Then she showed up at the All England Club without having played a grass court event to prepare for it, opting to rest instead after capturing the French Open.

That appeared to be a logical decision given that Świątek had a good chance to capture the gold medal at the Olympics with Roland Garros hosting. She had lost just one match there since 2019 but appeared overwhelmed throughout the competition. Świątek hit the wall in her semifinal match against Zheng Qinwen, the eventual gold medalist, who beat her in straight sets.

Her stress became apparent following the match, when she broke down in the mixed zone and walked through the media while crying, too distraught to speak.

There were losses in the semifinals of Cincinnati and the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open. Then Świątek stopped playing, telling the world she needed to attend to personal matters. But she had been provisionally suspended after testing positive for trace amounts of a performance-enhancing drug.

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A tribunal accepted her explanation that the substance, trimetazidine, got into her system from a tainted batch of the sleep aid melatonin, which had been prescribed to her. Świątek accepted a one-month suspension, but the experience of nearly losing her reputation and being subject to a far longer ban threw her. She has struggled to find her way ever since.

During a March 14 loss in Indian Wells, Calif. to Mirra Andreeva, Świątek slammed a ball in the direction of a ball kid. She later apologized but said in a social media post that she feels constantly judged and is constantly battling expectations.

“Will sharing this change anything? Probably not, because I clearly see how much we love judging, creating theories, and imposing opinions on others,” she wrote. “But perhaps a few people who genuinely want to understand what I’m experiencing will understand this. In any case, this external standard is definitely not my standard, and I don’t accept my team and me being boxed into external expectations.”

Świątek switched coaches last year, hiring Wim Fissette, who has helped other players, notably Naomi Osaka, become the world No. 1. Their results together have not measured up to last year, when she was working with Tomasz Wiktorowski, who had coached her since 2021.

She did better in the Australian Open, reaching the quarterfinals, but she could not successfully defend her titles in Doha, Indian Wells, Stuttgart and now Madrid.

To the extent that her current struggles have been psychological, responsibility for helping her through those issues falls to Daria Abramowicz, who has been working as her mental coach for the past five years. Abramowicz has been a constant presence on tour with Świątek during that time, travelling with her to every event, attending practices and sitting in her box during matches.

After Thursday’s loss and emotional breakdowns, Świątek grabbed her bag and quickly headed off the court. A camera showed her walking through the tunnel toward the locker room with Abramowicz following about 15 feet behind.

(Photo: Julian Finney / Getty Images)

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