There were questions about Iga Swiatek’s readiness for Roland Garros. No one is asking them anymore

Need a player to keep your tournament on schedule? Iga Swiatek is the player for you.

Last Monday, after Thiago Seyboth Wild took four hours and 15 minutes to upset Daniil Medvedev in Court Philippe Chatrier, Swiatek got things back on a track with a 73-minute dusting of Cristina Busca.

Today in Court Suzanne Lenglen, after Beatriz Haddad Maia and Holger Rune required nearly eight hours to secure their victories, Swiatek came to the rescue again. She won four quick games before her opponent, Lesia Tsurenko, had to retire with what she said was a viral illness at 5-1 in the first set.

The match, such as it was, lasted just 31 minutes. But even if Tsurenko had been healthy, it likely would have been a lop-sided affair. When they played last year on clay in Rome, Swiatek blitzed her way to a 6-2, 6-0 win.

The upshot is that the defending champion is into the quarterfinals—i.e., the business end—of Roland Garros. She has won 41 games and dropped just nine. Four of the seven sets she’s played have ended 6-0. She has spent a total of four hours and four minutes on court, which is roughly how long it took Rune to win his quarterfinal on Monday.

Swiatek has been asked, not surprisingly, if things are coming a little too easily in Paris, and whether she might not be ready for a challenge when it happens. But if anyone is used to rolling through a Roland Garros draw without ever being seriously challenged, it’s Swiatek. In 2020 she won the tournament without dropping a set; last year, she slipped up and lost one on her way to the title.

“I don’t feel like it’s a problem for me, because…I had many matches like that,” Swiatek said after double-bageling Xinyu Wang on Saturday. “But I just try to kind of take as much positive things, like confidence and just feeling that I can play my tennis. But kind of also reset from all the other stuff and the expectations and just go into another match like it’s a new one.”

After that win, Swiatek was particularly happy about “the way I kept my focus throughout the whole match.”

For Swiatek on the terre battue, that may be the biggest challenge: How to avoid losing concentration or motivation when you’re in the middle of a blowout win.

None of this is a surprise, but none of it was a given as of a week ago, either. Swiatek came to Roland Garros having retired from her last match in Rome with a potential leg injury, and not entirely sure she’d be able to defend her title in Paris. Now she’s into the quarterfinals, and the two women who seemed to be the biggest obstacles in her half, rival Elena Rybakina and former French champion Barbora Krejcikova, are both out. Her next opponent, Coco Gauff, struggles to get games, let alone sets or matches, from her. And she has mostly avoided the political questions that have unsettled No. 2 seed Aryna Sabalenka and made her a no-show in the interview room.

“I know I keep feeling better and better every day and that’s kind of what I wanted to achieve in this tournament,” Swiatek says. “I’m glad that I kind of feel the rhythm a little bit better on every match.”

Amidst the marathon matches on Monday in Lenglen, you could have blinked and missed the most dominant player in tennis. But that’s how Swiatek does things at Roland Garros. Chances are, we’ll see a lot more of her later this week.