World number one Inga Swietek, who won her second French Open title on Saturday, has displayed a fighting spirit to kick balls on the tennis courts in Warsaw since her early days.
“She was a little kid who really wanted to learn how to play as quickly as possible, and once she did, what mattered most to her was winning,” said her first coach, Artur Szostajko.
“She was a fighter,” the 51-year-old told AFP.
Szostaczko still teaches on the clay court where the Polish event first picked up a racket and tried her hand at hitting a concrete wall during her older sister’s lessons.
“Left, right, the whole time she was running about having a ball,” she said to a wall covered in colorful graffiti at the Warszawianka Tennis Club.
“Usually a young child has trouble hitting a ball or two, but he can continue to do it for dozens of shots,” said the coach, who likes Sweetek, always with a baseball cap on his head. Is.
Szostaczko tutored the talented sisters for five years, whose father Tomas is an Olympic rower, until Swietek was 10 years old.
Fast forward a decade and Sweetek is on top of women’s tennis, now has a second Roland Garros title under her belt after Saturday’s 6-1, 6-3 win over Coco Gauff.
She is also on a 35-match winning streak, equaling Venus Williams’ record for the longest women’s run since 2000.
Szostaczko said he is proud of his former student, whom he remembers as a fun kid who runs around with exceptional coordination and a smile on his face.
“I taught her to play aggressively, because that’s the future of tennis, and she’s doing an incredible job on the court today,” he said.
sweetek sisters
The siblings then moved on to My Tennis Club to coach Michal Kazanowski, who recalled that Sweetek always wanted to treat his hard-working older sister on an equal footing.
“Iga was really mad at me because I proposed some basic exercises, in which I would play eight balls to Agata, but only six balls to Iga because she was younger,” he told AFP. .
“This angered her. She went to her father and said she wanted Agata as much,” said the 35-year-old, adding to the “healthy sibling rivalry”.
He said that Agata was just as talented and had the advantage of being taller, but that injuries did not give the Williams sisters any chance to respond to Poland.
Younger Swietake continued to train under Kaznowski until the age of 15.
He said he was inspired by the now famous line from 11-year-old Serena Williams, who, when asked who she wanted to be, said: “I want other people to be like me”.
“We started thinking along those lines … to develop our own style, our own person,” Kazanowski said.
He looked more to men’s tennis for role models, not averse to idolizing any female player, lest Sweetek might one day find himself on the net from one of them.
“We wanted her to be able to play against top women without any insecurities,” he said.
“As we can see, it worked. There she is, and now everyone wants to be like Inga.”
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