The top-seeded Pole won her opening match
on Centre Court on Tuesday, beating Croatian qualifier Jana Fett 6-0, 6-3.
The victory was Swiatek’s 36th in row and
includes all seven matches she played at this year’s French Open in winning her
second title at Roland Garros. It’s the longest winning streak on the women’s
tour since 1997, when Martina Hingis won 37.
“It’s my first match on grass this season,
so I knew it’s going to be tricky,” Swiatek said on court. “I’m just figuring
out how to play here and trying to implement all the stuff that we were
practicing on.”
The men’s champion at Roland Garros also
won at Wimbledon on Tuesday. Rafael Nadal defeated Francisco Cerundolo 6-4,
6-3, 3-6, 6-4 in the first round a few hours after Swiatek finished her match.
Even with seven-time champion Serena
Williams in the draw at the All England Club, Swiatek is the woman to beat. She
won five tournaments before heading to Paris in May, earning consecutive titles
in Doha, Indian Wells, Miami, Stuttgart and Rome.
Swiatek, again wearing a pin with the
colors of Ukraine on her hat, started out like she left off in her last match
at the French Open. But she went down 3-1 in the second set before recovering.
“The second set, at the beginning I lost my
focus a little bit and she used that pretty well,” Swiatek said.
Coco Gauff, who lost to Swiatek in this
year’s French Open final, also won her opening match. The 11th-seeded American
beat Elena-Gabriela Ruse of Romania 2-6, 6-3, 7-5.
Gauff got the go-ahead break in the third
set at 5-5 on her sixth break point of the game when Ruse double-faulted.
In her two previous appearances at the All
England Club, Gauff reached the fourth round.
Barbora Krejcikova, who won the French Open
in 2021 to split Swiatek’s two titles there, also advanced to the second round.
The 13th-seeded Czech defeated Maryna Zanevska of Belgium 7-6 (4), 6-3.
No. 4 Paula Badosa, No. 5 Maria Sakkari,
No. 12 Jelena Ostapenko, No. 16 Simona Halep of Romania and No. 25 Petra
Kvitova of the Czech Republic also advanced. Both Halep and Kvitova are former
champions at the All England Club.
Among the seeded player to lose was Olympic
champion Belinda Bencic. The 14th-seeded Swiss player lost to Qiang Wang of
China 6-4, 5-7, 6-2.
No. 18 Jil Teichmann of Switzerland, No. 20
Amanda Anisimova of the United States and No. 27 Yulia Putintseva of Kazakhstan
also lost.
Like Swiatek, Nadal was also playing for
the first time since Paris, where he won his men’s record 22nd Grand Slam
singles title. And because of the pandemic and his left-foot injury, he said he
hadn’t played on grass since 2019, when he reached the semifinals at the All
England Club.
The two-time Wimbledon champion is
attempting to win his third consecutive Grand Slam tournament, but his foot is
a question mark.
“Every day is a test and today has been one
of these important tests,” Nadal said on court. “I know at the beginning of the
tournament especially, and the difficult circumstances that I arrived here, the
victory is the most important thing because that gives me the chance to
practice tomorrow again and to have another match in two days.”
Also in the men’s draw, No. 18 Grigor
Dimitrov of Bulgaria retired from his match with an apparent injury. He was
leading Steve Johnson of the United States 6-4, 2-5 when he stopped.
No. 12 Diego Schwartzman of Argentina, No.
15 Reilly Opelka of the United States, No. 17 Roberto Bautista Agut of Spain
and unseeded Nick Kyrgios of Australia also won. -AP
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