Iga Swiatek’s worrying defeat against Jelena Ostapenko in the Stuttgart Open quarter-finals was the first part of a nightmare scenario that could see her face a huge WTA Rankings slide over the next few weeks.
World No 2 Swiatek’s dominance on clay courts made her defeat against Ostapenko all the more unexpected, even though she has now lost all six of her matches against an opponent who clearly knows how to take her out of her comfort zone.
What comes next could define not only Swiatek’s story for the rest of 2025, but also for the long term as she has a glut of ranking points to defend over the next month.
The WTA Rankings are compiled over a 52-week rolling period that sees points drop off a player’s total after a year and she has a massive 4,000 points coming out of her current haul after she won the Madrid Open, Rome Open and French Open in 2024.
Swiatek’s mastery of the red European dirt was confirmed during her glorious run of form in April, May and June of last year, but it does mean she is under huge pressure to defend those points over the next few weeks.
Ostapenko is one of the few players that appears to give Swiatek real trouble, but her confidence may have been rocked by this latest setback and she may now head to Madrid with uncertainty as one of her biggest enemies.
If she were to lose half of the ranking points she collected in this period of 2024, she would drop face the prospect of dropping out of the top two of the WTA Rankings and if she lost more points than that, he position in the top six or six positions could be under threat.
The Polish star has struggled to find her best form consistently this season and while some of her performances have been clinical and dominant, others have been uncharacteristically erratic.
She has suggested criticism from the media in her Polish homeland has not helped her cause, but this four-time French Open champion should be confident of finding plenty of wins on her favourite surface over the next month.
“It’s still a challenge because it’s not like I come to play [on clay] and everything is perfect suddenly,” Swiatek said at Stuttgart Media Day on Monday. “We play on a hard court most of the year, so coming to clay court I still need some time to adjust to.
“But for sure, I feel like I’m in the right place. With a good amount of work and focus, I’m going to be able to start playing my game.”
Swiatek leads the statistics for clay court wins on the WTA Tour, but she will be keen to avoid Ostapenko in upcoming draws as the Latvian star clearly appears to have found a way to beat her.