Before this year, the past seven women’s singles titles at Wimbledon were won by seven different players. Then, on Saturday, Barbora Krejčíková became the eighth new champion in a row. Her victory was a surprise—but it was not as shocking as what she did three years ago, when she used her crafty, all-court game to take advantage of a broken draw and win the French Open. No one expected that: although Krejčíková had been the No. 1 doubles player in the world, she had never found much success on the singles tour. She’d never even made the main draw of Wimbledon. Now she has won it, defeating Jasmine Paolini 6–2, 2–6, 6–4 in the final.
The big tournaments on the women’s tour can seem vulnerable to upstart challengers, particularly in comparison to those on the men’s side, which seem to be reliably dominated by the greats of one golden age or another. There are reasons for this: the best-of-three format of the women’s side makes upsets more likely than the men’s best-of-five, and the depth of the women’s tour means that any number of good players are a burst of confidence away from becoming great. Even so, there has been, for years, real stability at the top of the women’s game—the same few players consistently making deep runs. For a time, Krejčíková thought she should be among them, and was miffed that she wasn’t regarded that way. She had wins in finals over Iga Świątek, and she had that 2021 Slam. “I’ve had a lot of success on the tour and I just don’t get the credit,” she told WTA Insider last year. But as soon as she said that the results disappeared. A rash of injuries and illness didn’t help, but it was more than that. She had bad losses in early rounds; there was a sense that she was not actually as relevant a player as she claimed to be. Injuries kept her off the tour from mid-February to mid-April, and, when she returned, she suffered a string of losses. Coming into Wimbledon, she had won only a couple of matches since the end of January.
Wimbledon is not like other tournaments. The grass courts are slick; the ball stays down. Players grow up mostly playing on clay and hard courts, where the shots bounce instead of skid, and feet don’t slip as much. The top player in the women’s game, Świątek—who won the French Open the year before Krejčíková’s victory and the next three French Open titles after it—usually arrives at Wimbledon exhausted, having done so much winning during the clay-court season, which immediately precedes it. This year was no different for her: she lost in the third round, to Yulia Putintseva. Afterward, Świątek was asked what she might do differently in the future. “Take a vacation,” she said.
Świątek’s opponent in this year’s French Open final had been Jasmine Paolini, another surprise. Everything about Paolini suggests energy: her compact, muscular build; her ebullient smile; even her curly hair, which she wears in a happy pile atop her head. She does not seem to walk and run so much as gambol and bounce. What she does not resemble, at first glance, is a top tennis player. These days, the women’s game is for ball-bashers, with big serves and bigger forehands. Most of the élite players are close to six feet tall. (Krejčíková is five feet ten.) Paolini is listed at five-four, which is almost certainly a stretch. (Five-three is plausible.) She is twenty-eight years old, from Tuscany, and, until this year, had spent much of her career ranked somewhere between fifty and a hundred.
Then Paolini went on a run, powered by more dynamic movements on the court and that inexplicable elixir of self-belief. She won a big title in Dubai. She reached the French Open final—where she wasn’t much of a match for Świątek. But Paolini seemed unbothered by the loss. Before this season, she had never won a main-level grass-court match. Her coaches have encouraged her to recognize advantages that she has on grass, she has said—being short means that she doesn’t have to bend for her ground strokes, for instance, and topspin doesn’t jump up on her the way it can on other surfaces. This year, after her adept performance at the French Open—and more training on her footwork—she began to believe them. She came into the final against Krejčíková on a streak of some luck and a lot of tenacity, having just played the longest women’s semifinal in Wimbledon history. There are a lot of agonists in women’s tennis; Paolini seems like the rare, irrepressible optimist.
When the final began, Krejčíková used her stronger serve and faster ground strokes to put Paolini on the defensive immediately. She cannily mixed the height of her shots, sometimes moonballing her forehand to pin Paolini back on the baseline, sometimes flattening the arc and finding sharper angles. Mostly, though, she dictated play through her serve, which rarely missed: she made nineteen of twenty-one first serves, and won nearly all those points. (Paolini won only about half of hers.) In the second set, the story almost reversed: then it was Krejčíková who looked overwhelmed. Her first-serve percentage dropped, and Paolini pounced on her slower second serves, taking her chances to come to net, and flinging her body into her shots. There were thrilling exchanges, but most of the tension was on Krejčíková’s side.
Confidence is an unfathomable, ineffable factor in tennis, and it can sometimes seem that Krejčíková has too much of it, and at other times not enough. In the third set, she found her balance. The serve steadied. She used the depth of her shot and her guile around the court to counter Paolini’s superior movement. Paolini, whose weak second serve had been under immense pressure all day, deserted her at break point, and she double-faulted to give up a service break. As the set progressed, it was Paolini whose shoulders slumped. It took Krejčíková three tries on championship point to win it. As she accepted the trophy, she said she was having a hard time describing her feelings. There was nothing surprising about that. ♦