Poland’s biggest tennis star has fallen to ninth place in the global ranking after a poor year on court. Polish tennis ace Iga Świątek has slipped to her lowest world ranking position in four-and-a-half years, plummeting to ninth place on the back of a disappointing season. The former world number one spent 125 weeks at the top of the WTA rankings between April 2022 and October 2024, the seventh-highest total the history of women’s tennis. But the form that saw her triumph in six Grand Slams has not been apparent in her game this season, with her last major tournament victory being at Wimbledon in 2025. She exited the US Open, this year’s final Grand Slam tournament, in the fourth round last week. Her current ninth place is the lowest she has been since February 2022, two months before she first took the top spot. String of disappointments This season started on par for the 25-year-old from Raszyn, near Warsaw, with a quarterfinal place in the Australian Open in January–February. A change of coach failed to deliver hoped-for improvements, however, and she was knocked out of the French Open—where she once dominated—in the round of 16 at the end of May. She went on to lose a lot of ranking points at Wimbledon, where she failed to defend her title and suffered a shock third-round exit—a performance that saw her slip from third place in the ranking to eighth. Too little, too late Poland's most successful tennis player managed to climb back to fifth place on the back of victory in the Canadian Open, a non-Grand Slam tournament, in August. But reaching the semi-finals of the Cincinnati Open later the same month was not enough for her to hold the position, and she slipped back to eighth before the US Open, which ended on Sunday. It leaves her in her lowest position since early 2022, when her major successes were yet to come. Świątek made her debut in the WTA rankings at the age of 15 after winning her first professional title at the 2016 ITF tournament in Stockholm.
