Swiatek, who lost in straight sets to 17-year-old Andreeva on Thursday, began sounding the alarm about an increasingly hectic last summer in Cincinnati, calling the schedule, compounded by the addition of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, “exhausting.” The five-time Grand Slam champion doubled down two weeks later at the US Open following her quarterfinal defeat to Jessica Pegula, taking explicit issue with the number of mandatory 500- and 1000-level tournaments top players are required to enter.
Both Swiatek and Sabalenka ultimately incurred ranking penalties at the end of 2024 for failing to participate in the full slate of mandatory tournaments (all Grand Slam tournaments and WTA 1000 tournaments plus six WTA 500s).
“There are people saying that, ‘Oh, I don’t have to play so many tournaments, but…the fact is that we have so many mandatory tournaments that we literally need to show up and we don’t have time to work on stuff or live peacefully, because from one tournament we’re going straight to another,” she said in New York.
“We don’t even have time until the end of the year, because literally the first tournament starts on 29th of December,” she added. “So yeah, the season is, for sure, too long.”
