Swiatek wins 36th straight match
Berrettini is forced to withdraw after COVID diagnosis
From the red clay of the French Open to the green grass of Wimbledon, the wins keep coming for Iga Swiatek.
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.
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.
Other men’s winners included No. 4 seed Stefanos Tsitsipas, No. 11 Taylor Fritz and unseeded Nick Kyrgios. No. 6 Felix Auger-Aliassime bowed out against serve-and-volleying American Maxime Cressy 6-7 (5), 6-4, 7-6 (9), 7-6 (5).
But the most significant matter in the men’s field was the withdrawal of Matteo Berrettini, last year’s runner-up to Novak Djokovic at the All England Club, because of a positive COVID-19 test. Another past finalist, Marin Cilic, pulled out Monday for the same reason.
Both Berrettini, who went 9-0 on grass courts elsewhere this month, and Cilic, the 2014 U.S. Open champion, got themselves checked for COVID-19 after developing symptoms; players are not required to get tested in order to compete.
The men’s bracket already is missing six of the top 11 in the ATP rankings: No. 1 Daniil Medvedev (ban on Russians), No. 2 Alexander Zverev (ankle surgery), Auger-Alissiame, No. 8 Andrey Rublev (ban on Russians), No. 10 Hubert Hurkacz (lost Monday) and No. 11 Berrettini.
“I feel very sorry for him,” Nadal said about Berrettini, “because he was playing fantastic.”
As for Swiatek, she comes to Wimbledon having earned consecutive titles in Doha, Indian Wells, Miami, Stuttgart and Rome before winning the French last month. But she said she was taking nothing for granted.
“It’s my first match on grass this season, so I knew it’s going to be tricky,” Swiatek said. “I’m just figuring out how to play here and trying to implement all the stuff that we were practicing on.”
Swiatek, again wearing a pin with the colors of Ukraine on her hat, started out like she left off in her last match in Paris. 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 players 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 also wasplaying 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 trying 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. “I know at the beginning of the tournament especially, and the difficult circumstances that I arrived (in) 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.”
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.
But 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.