"Winning final, semifinals are not my goals" – Iga Swiatek divulges not focusing on "results" after US Open QF loss to Jessica Pegula
Iga Swiatek bowed out of the 2024 US Open after a valiant Jessica Pegula defeated her in the quarterfinals on Wednesday, September 4. This was Pegula's fourth win against Swiatek in ten meetings.
The American pressed Swiatek right from the word go as she broke the Pole in the first game of the match and then three more times to secure a 6-2, 6-4 win in less than 90 minutes.
Pegula hit 12 winners and induced a staggering 41 unforced errors from Swiatek and entered her first-ever Grand Slam semifinal after seven losses in the quarterfinals in recent years.
After the match ended, Iga Swiatek, who is the World No. 1 and the 2022 champion of New York, was asked by the media to reflect on managing expectations during the tournament in Flushing Meadows.
In response, she divulged not focusing on results but the work she puts in:
"Everybody is always speaking about results straightaway when you go to a tournament, they want to know what my goal is, I don't know, winning the final, the semifinal, and it's just not it, you know, these are not my goals when I go in a tournament."
She continued:
"That's my answer kind of, because I want to explain that I don't expect from myself the results. I'm more expecting that I'm going to work and I'm going to go through some problems and work on them, and that's it."
Iga Swiatek: "I'm always trying to have lower expectations"
In the same interaction with the media, Iga Swiatek noted that her colleagues are equally capable of winning the 2024 US Open title, hence, she didn't have high self-expectations.
"I'm always trying to have lower expectations, because I know that any of us can win this tournament, and it's not going to be easy, you know. And also, I feel like when I have high expectations, I never perform well. So I try to lower them," the 23-year-old said.
However, she denied ruling herself out of the contention straight away as she felt she possessed the quality to win.
"It's not like it's just low and that's it, you know, because it's hard to have low expectations when everybody is expecting something from you, and you kind of know that you might have a game to play well," she added.
Notably, Iga Swiatek has made an improvement during the ongoing New York Major in the sense that she crashed out of last year's draw in the third round. She lost to Latvia's Jelena Ostapenko. The Pole ends her Grand Slam season in 2024 with 15 wins out of 18 matches, triumphing at the French Open. She suffered third-round exits at Wimbledon and the Australian Open.