Ukraine’s Elina Svitolina celebrates after beating Poland’s Iga Swiatek to win their women’s singles match on day nine of the Wimbledon tennis championships in London, on July 11, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP
Even the world’s best players are not immune to crippling nerves as Iga Swiatek discovered when her Wimbledon dreams were turned to dust in a 7-5 6-7(5) 6-2 quarter-final defeat by Ukrainian wildcard Elina Svitolina on Tuesday.
Svitolina, who returned to the tour in April after giving birth to her daughter last October, might have been facing an opponent who was riding high on a 14-match winning streak but she never stopped believing even when she was on the receiving end of some brutal shots from the four-time Grand Slam champion.
After almost three hours of nerve-jangling drama, Svitolina gave her war-ravaged homeland something to cheer about when she pulled off the biggest upset of this year’s championships.
“I don’t know what is happening right now in my head. It’s just really unbelievable,” a beaming Svitolina told the crowd after setting up a last four showdown with the Czech Republic’s Marketa Vondrousova.
“At the beginning of the tournament if somebody would tell me that I will be in the semi-final and beating the world number one, I would say they are crazy!”
“I’m happy I could bring a little happiness to people in Ukraine.”
The early exchanges did not exactly go Svitolina’s way as she found herself 4-2 down in the opening set and she struggled to get her serve going in blustery conditions on Centre Court, leaving Swiatek to edge into a 5-3 lead.
But the momentum suddenly swung Svitolina’s way as from 0-30 down on her serve in the ninth game, she went on to win 16 of the next 18 points to bag the first set and leave a shell-shocked Swiatek wondering what had gone wrong.
That sequence included breaking Swiatek’s serve twice in succession, with the Polish top seed surrendering the first of those to love with a double fault.
After Swiatek guided a backhand volley into the tramlines to hand Svitolina the set, the players had to endure a 20-minute break as the roof was closed to shut out the dark clouds hovering over Centre Court.
That interlude gave Swiatek a chance to re-evaluate her tactics and she came back to break Svitolina for a 2-1 lead in the second set.
Swiatek’s 28-year-old rival, however, kept breathing down her neck and made it all square at 3-3 by pounding some ferocious groundstrokes from the baseline.
Swiatek earned two more break…
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