"It was mind-blowing" - Swiatek cites Nadal's Australian Open triumph as inspiration

World No 2 Iga Swiatek won a title at the Indian Wells Masters and she has been having a very successful season so far, but she’s admitted to looking up to a 21 time Grand Slam champion for inspiration.

The self proclaimed perfectionist used to struggle when things weren’t going right in a match for her, so she started to look at how world No 3 Rafael Nadal reacted when he went behind in a game and learnt that she winning doesn’t have to look good. She explained:

“I think just getting older and more experienced helped because really a few years ago I didn’t even get the idea of being happy about winning ugly, I was like, what? That’s not possible. But right now I want to use the experience of older players."

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She further continued:

“I watched a lot of tennis in the past two years and I’ve seen many comebacks and many times where Rafa for example wasn’t playing his best tennis but still he was finding solutions, the last match I can talk about was the Australian Open final which was mind-blowing for me because I was honestly sitting in the stands and even I was like, oh I don’t think he’s going to come back it’s kind of impossible."

And finished off with:

“But he did it, that’s a lesson for all of us that we’ve got to keep pushing and keep fighting and keep wanting to get the solutions and getting better – I think these kinds of experiences and the huge inspiration that I get from players gave me a lot.”