The aura of Iga: On Swiatek’s 2022-style run to the WTA Finals title, and the year-end No. 1 ranking

Playing Iga Swiatek must come with a unique—and immediate—sort of pressure. You know that if you go down a break, even in the first two or three games of the match, you could quickly find yourself on the wrong end of a bulldozer. No one on either tour feeds her opponents as many breadsticks and bagels, and no one is as hard to catch once she gets out in front of you and sees open highway ahead.

Just ask Swiatek’s latest victim, Jessica Pegula. The American came into Monday’s championship match at the WTA Finals having not dropped a set in four matches there. Her consistency and unflappability had served her well in the semi-hurricane-like conditions in Cancun, and were too much for No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, No. 4 Elena Rybakina and No. 5 Coco Gauff.

If anything, though, Swiatek had been even better. She also hadn’t dropped a set. She had handed out bagels to the Wimbledon champion, Marketa Vondrousova, and the US Open champion, Gauff. And she had handled the world No. 1, Sabalenka, almost as easily, winning their semifinal 6-3, 6-2 to keep her chase for No. 1 alive. Couple that with her WTA 1000 title in Beijing, and Swiatek was approaching her generally unbeatable level of play from 2022. The doubts, errors, surprise defeats and unhappy conversations with her coaching team that had crept into her game in 2023 had started to creep out again.

“I felt like it’s just kind of ridiculous because people got used to me winning,” Swiatek said earlier this week, of the expectations that dogged her this season. “It’s not like it’s going to happen all the time. So I think this season was kind of more normal, I would say.”

But that’s not how her season ended. Swiatek finished with a flawless, 6-1, 6-0 throwback blow-out against Pegula.

It took less than 10 minutes for her to grab the lead for good. The moment of separation came with Pegula serving at 1-2. That’s when Swiatek’s heavier ground strokes began to take a toll. She started the game with a hard backhand return up the middle that forced an error. She went up 15-40 with a big one-two forehand combination that forced another error. When Pegula tried to answer with a hard, down-the-line forehand of her own, she missed it wide.

That’s how it would go the rest of the way. Pegula made as many unforced errors, 21, as she won points. Swiatek, meanwhile, won 82 percent of her first-serve points, and was five for seven on break points. The most interesting stat, though, was Swiatek’s winner count: She hit just nine.

Swiatek made two adjustments during the fall, one philosophical and once tactical. Philosophically, she changed her attitude toward the race for the year-end No. 1; basically, she said she stopped worrying about it. Tactically, after an error-strewn defeat in Tokyo, she began to pull back and play with less risk. Both of those shifts worked to her benefit over the past month.

In Beijing, Swiatek found out that even when she didn’t go all-out for winners, she still had the shots to dictate rallies against most of her opponents. You could see that in the Cancun final as well.

When she went on offense, Swiatek kept the ball well within the sidelines. She sent her returns hard and up the middle. She didn’t go for broke on her down-the-line backhands. And she was happy pounding forceful crosscourt forehands, rather than trying to find sharper winning angles. Pegula was able to reach those shots, but she couldn’t do anything with them. In that respect, the game that Swiatek used to win on Monday reminded me of the game that Novak Djokovic used to win in Bercy over the weekend.

By the end, as she kept widening her lead, and kept stalking around the court as if she had a tee time to make, it felt like old times. Swiatek had her aura back. She also had her No. 1 ranking back, just in time to claim her second straight season at the top. In the end, she got exactly what she said she didn’t care about anymore. She set herself free from everyone’s expectations, including her own, and let her game take over again. Nobody has as much of that as Swiatek does right now.