Iga Swiatek carries a father’s Olympic ghost and has built a dynasty around it. In the summer of 1988, a young Polish rower named Tomasz Swiatek arrived in Seoul for the Olympic Games. He competed in the men’s quadruple sculls, the sport he had dedicated years of his life to, and his boat finished seventh overall. No medal. No ceremony. Just the long journey home and the quiet life of a man who had gone as far as he could and found the podium one place out of reach.
Tomasz never quite let it go. Not the dream itself, but the shape it left behind. When his daughters were born, first Agata and then Iga in Warsaw in 2001, he steered them toward sport as someone who understood what dedication could build and what it sometimes failed to deliver. He initially wanted his children to follow him into water sports. Swiatek, who was frightened of water, was not interested. She chose tennis instead, and her father followed her there.
She has often spoken about her father being the one who both inspired her to pursue tennis and pushed her when she was unsure whether to continue.
Iga Swiatek: The Story Behind The Player
The Years of Believing
Her mother, Dorota, an orthodontist, became the financial backbone behind Swiatek’s early tennis career, funding lessons through her dental clinic. The family was not wealthy. The sport was expensive. There were stretches where the money ran short, and Tomasz later admitted that there had been a moment when he had to tell Swiatek that they might have to stop, that he was against the wall financially.
What kept him going was what he saw in her. Swiatek has spoken about how, at ten years old, she would want to stay after school and play football with other children rather than train, and her father would appear at the school gates calling her name, pulling her back toward the court. It was not cruelty. It was a man who had felt the weight of almost and did not want his daughter to feel it too. “He was strict about practices and healthy routines in a way that, when I look back on it, I’m grateful for,” she said. “My dad was that voice in my head that was always leading me the right way.”
Her parents divorced during her teenage years. Swiatek and her sister stayed with their father. Her mother, who watched every match from a distance, later described a relationship that had grown distant and formal. “I always congratulate my daughter on titles, usually by email,” Dorota said in an interview. “On the other hand, contact is severely limited.” For years, Swiatek barely mentioned her mother in interviews. It was one of many things she held privately, a discipline that extended far beyond the baseline.
In February 2019, when Swiatek was seventeen and ranked just inside the top 150, her team approached sports psychologist Daria Abramowicz. Abramowicz traveled to Budapest to watch her play and was immediately struck by her competitive intensity. She joined the traveling team and has not left. Abramowicz is, by her own account, the only full-time psychologist on either tour who travels with a player from tournament to tournament. The arrangement became a source of fascination and, in Poland, genuine controversy.
Some questioned the closeness of the relationship. Others argued it was the reason for her dominance. Swiatek herself, when critics turned on Abramowicz during a difficult run of results, defended her simply and firmly: she pointed out that for years the same people had credited the partnership with her success. During her 2020 French Open run, Swiatek said Abramowicz had made her “smarter” and that the psychologist could “read her mind.” She saw no contradiction. She was doing what her father had taught her: finding what worked, and refusing to let it go.
Paris, 2024
By the summer of 2024, Swiatek had won four French Open titles and stood as the most dominant player in women’s tennis. She arrived at the Paris Olympics as the overwhelming favourite, playing on the same red clay where she had not lost a match in three years. The Games held a weight for her that no Grand Slam had ever quite matched.
Her father had competed at the Seoul Olympics of 1988 as a rower and had failed to win a medal. She and her sister, she said, had been raised in the belief that the Olympics were the most important tournament of all. It did not go as planned. In the semifinal, against China’s Zheng Qinwen, she sprayed 36 unforced errors and was beaten in straight sets. Devastated, she cried for hours. She did not speak to the press. The criticism came fast and loud. The next morning, she went back out and won the bronze medal match in under an hour.
Afterwards, in a television interview, when a photograph of her with her father was placed in front of her, she became emotional. “Basically because of him I’m playing tennis,” she said. “In tough moments, my dad was there to keep me going.”
Tomasz Swiatek had gone to Seoul in 1988 and came home empty-handed. Thirty-six years later, his daughter stood on a podium in Paris with a medal around her neck, and Poland had its first-ever Olympic tennis medallist. He was there to see it. He is always there to see it. Those who have watched him in the stands over the years will tell you the same thing: the man weeps.
He gave her everything he had. She gave the dream a different ending.
Main photo credit: Geoff Burke-Imagn Images