How does Coco Gauff solve a problem like Iga Swiatek?

PARIS — Coco Gauff does not appear to have a ton of major problems in her life.

She has a loving family. She is an excellent tennis player, one of the best in the world. She has lots of friends and countless fans. She travels the world playing a glamorous sport, and at 20 years old, she is already a Grand Slam champion and among the highest-paid athletes in the world.

She does have one major problem, though.

Her name is Iga Swiatek, and she is the world’s best female tennis player. On Thursday in Paris, in the semifinals of the French Open, she beat Gauff 6-2, 6-4, for the 11th time in 12 matches.

It’s the sort of one-on-one domination that can drive a player mad.

Each week, Swiatek gets a step closer to becoming the dominant player of the post-Serena Williams era of tennis, especially when it comes to beating one of the players who is supposed to make her work hard to maintain that supremacy. It’s particularly rough for Gauff on the red clay of Roland Garros, but she is pretty certain that Swiatek would beat her on a court made of marshmallows.

“I don’t know if it’s a big difference in our particular head-to-head,” she said about Swiatek’s effectiveness against her.

Tennis has had no shortage of rivalries (or as they turn out, non-rivalries) that have gone this way. Sometimes a player simply has the bad luck of being born at the wrong time, of ripening in an era when basically every other opponent on the other side of the net is manageable. But there’s this one player …

For Maria Sharapova, it was Serena Williams, who was 20-2 against her. Sharapova, six years younger than Williams, couldn’t outlast her. Williams retired two years after she did. For Andy Roddick, it was Roger Federer, who was 21-3 against him. They were born a year apart.

It’s more manageable than what happened to Tomas Berdych, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, David Nalbandian, David Ferrer, Dominic Thiem and countless others, who came up in an era when every other opponent on the other side of the net was manageable, except three, sometimes four.

Some of them even made it through that and found two more young un-manageables waiting for them.

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In team sports, being not as good as one other person is solvable with better teammates. Tennis, like many individual sports, is an inexorably cruel endeavor. Someone holds the top spot in the rankings; everyone else holds their inferiority complexes.

Gauff will rise to second in the WTA Tour rankings Monday, officially making her better at her chosen profession than roughly 4 billion other women. Yet at the end of her workday Thursday, she still felt pretty crappy because the one other person who is better than her is still here and isn’t going anywhere. Swiatek is just three years older than Gauff and, after just 12 meetings, feels like an immovable object against which Gauff will be pushing for years to come.

Iga Swiatek raced into her fourth French Open final. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)

In her 11 defeats to Swiatek, Gauff has won an average of five games per match and has lost every match in straight sets. In the overall head-to-head, including Gauff’s solitary win in Cincinnati in August 2023, Swiatek has won 23 sets and Gauff has won two.

In this match at Roland Garros, the losing, the frustration of the matchup and Swiatek’s relentlessness all combined to push Gauff over the edge. Early in the second set, with the American battling to climb back into the match, came a moment when any extra advantage that Swiatek might gain would feel terminally overwhelming.

A line judge erroneously called a Swiatek serve out instead of in. Chair umpire Aurelie Tourte ruled that the call hadn’t affected Gauff’s return. She awarded Swiatek the point.

Gauff approached the umpire and erupted as she almost never does. The crowd howled, seemingly on her side.

“They’re booing because they know you’re wrong,” she yelled.

Tourte didn’t budge.

“When you’re playing against her — every point matters against anybody, but especially against her,” Gauff said later.

“I usually don’t get too frustrated with decisions like that, but I think it was just a combination of everything going on in the moment.”

The disagreement galvanised Coco Gauff, but not for long enough. (Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)

Gauff actually went on to win that game, pushing ahead 3-1. Her right arm was coming alive. She was rocketing serves off her racket at 125 mph. Keep that up and she could begin to think about pushing the match to a third set.

About 80 feet away, Swiatek was experiencing the moment completely differently: the tennis version of “stuff happens.” She’d already broken Gauff’s serve a couple of times in the first set, just as she had done time and again in her previous 11 wins.

Now she was just going to do it again.

“Didn’t matter for me,” Swiatek said. “I’m playing well on the return, and I can kind of win the return game, and the score will be even.”

That’s exactly how it went. Swiatek broke Gauff in the next game, and then in the one after that, a game in which Gauff couldn’t win a point.

Gauff said it was the moment that broke her down, brought her to tears and momentarily galvanised her, until Swiatek fulfilled what was inevitable and took the match away from her again.

It was the moment, but it was also the meta, the psychological environment and scarring of a rivalry like this. It can manifest in other ways. One of those men’s players who grew up in the shadow of three and is now watching two disappear into the distance is former French Open finalist Stefanos Tsitsipas, who lost to world No. 3 Carlos Alcaraz for the sixth time out of six on Tuesday night. At several points in the match — most visibly after an Alcaraz grunt that the Greek took exception to — it appeared as if they didn’t like each other, like things had dissolved into interpersonal beef and needle.

They hadn’t. Tsitsipas wasn’t emoting at Alcaraz the man; he was emoting at Alcaraz the figurehead, Alcaraz the two Grand Slam title winner, Alcaraz the magician with gossamer touch and groundstrokes like an ice-axe. Most of all, at Alcaraz the player: the player that Tsitsipas was anointed and promised to be but has never quite become. It was the humiliation of being overtaken by someone who has all your tricks and executes them better than you.

It was the cruelty of tennis.

Players have managed to reverse these Sisyphean deficits, particularly in these rivalries at the top of the sport, where having such a rivalry — even a devastatingly lopsided one — can eventually lift both players to greater heights, as one seeks to maintain it and the other chips away. Rafael Nadal dominated Federer for a time, before Federer figured out how not to let Nadal punish his backhand match after match. Nadal was 14-4 against Novak Djokovic at one point. Nearly two decades after that rivalry began, Djokovic is ahead 30-29.

Coco Gauff and Iga Swiatek will be on opposite sides of the net for years to come. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)

Gauff will probably be hoping only she gets lifted, but she has time. It’s still early days for her career, even though pretty soon it will start to feel like she has been around forever, if it doesn’t already. This is what happens when you start winning Grand Slam matches at 15.

She spoke earlier this week of having had to manage winning matches at the highest level as a teenager while trying to develop her game. At times, she said, she probably prioritized winning matches against lesser competition — something she could do playing safer and more defensively — over developing the weapons she needs to beat the best players in the world.

She especially needs those weapons against a player like Swiatek.

“I know that there are things that I can improve to make this a closer score line,” she said.

She has total control over whether she can serve better. Her forehand, often a liability, was wobbly for stretches once more: The match started and ended with a forehand error that landed off the court.

“I don’t feel like my game is all the way developed yet.”

The problem for her is that Swiatek’s likely isn’t, either. She’s already done some remaking of her serve and has a surprisingly deft and audacious net game that she’s largely put back into her toolbox since her breakout French Open title. The scary thought for Gauff might be that she can bring it out if she needs.

But Gauff’s in the same boat — she has more to find. And she’s already made it all the way to second best.

There’s just this one other player …

(Top photo: Mateo Villalba/Getty Images)