A season ago, Iga Swiatek only qualified for the WTA Finals with a couple of weeks to spare. She was the fifth of eight players to get into the season-ending event for women’s tennis, a situation she found stressful.
What about in 2022? Swiatek was so dominant throughout the
year that she booked her spot in September, the first to do so. And when play
begins Monday, Swiatek will be the top seed after holding the No. 1 ranking
since April and leading the tour in titles (eight) and match wins (64).
Swiatek, a 21-year-old from Poland, heads the Tracy Austin
Group that was determined by the draw Friday night, joined by Coco Gauff,
Caroline Garcia and Daria Kasatkina. The Nancy Richey Group will be Ons Jabeur,
Jessica Pegula, Maria Sakkari and Aryna Sabalenka.
The singles and doubles fields both were split into two
groups of four for the round-robin portion of the WTA Finals, which will be
contested on an indoor hard court.
The top two finishers in each group will advance to the
semifinals.
In doubles, the Rosie Casals Group is Pegula and Gauff,
Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova, Xu Yifan and Yang Zhaoxuan, and
Desire Krawczyk and Demi Schuurs; the Pam Shriver Group is Gabriela Dabrowski
and Giuliana Olmos, Veronika Kudermetova and Elise Mertens, Lyudmyla Kichenok
and Jelena Ostapenko, and Anna Danilina and Beatriz Haddad Maia.
Pegula and Gauff are the first pair of women entered in both
singles and doubles at the WTA Finals since Serena and Venus Williams did it in
2009. No. 3 Pegula and No. 4 Gauff are also the first two American women both
ranked in the top four since the Williams sisters in 2010.
Jabeur, Pegula, Gauff and Kasatkina are all appearing at the
event for the first time. Since 2000, only twice were there more WTA Finals
participants making their singles debuts: In 2001, five women were in the field
for the first time, and last year, six were.
The WTA Finals are returning to the United States for the
first time since 2005 after the tour moved it out of China for the second year
in a row.
The 2021 WTA Finals originally were supposed to be held in
Shenzhen, China, but were moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, amid the coronavirus
pandemic.
Then, late last year, the tour said that it would not have
any tournaments in China in 2022 because of concerns about the safety of Peng
Shuai, a Grand Slam doubles champion who accused a former government official
in that country of sexual assault.
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