Polish teenager Iga Swiatek reached her first grand slam final with a dominant victory over Nadia Podoroska at the French Open.
In one of the most unexpected slam semi-finals in recent times, Swiatek fully justified her status as favourite with a 6-2 6-1 victory in windy conditions at Roland Garros.
The 19-year-old has established herself as one of the most exciting young talents in the game since winning the Wimbledon junior title two years ago and has been unstoppable at Roland Garros so far.
Unseeded ➡️ into the final
Iga Swiatek is one win away from the 🏆 at #RolandGarros! pic.twitter.com/ynjIJe8kIG
— US Open Tennis (@usopen) October 8, 2020
Her quarter-final demolition of top seed Simona Halep was the stand-out, but the way Swiatek has backed that up has been just as impressive and she is yet to drop more than four games in any set.
The Pole will contest just her second tour-level final after losing to Polona Hercog at the low-key WTA tournament in Lugano last year.
The stakes here are considerably higher, with Swiatek moving on to face either Petra Kvitova or Sofia Kenin for a prize packet of nearly £1.5million.
It is the second year in a row that an unseeded 19-year-old has made the final, with Marketa Vondrousova losing to Ashleigh Barty last summer.
Defeat ends the remarkable run of world number 131 Podoroska, the lowest-ranked player to reach the semi-finals in Paris in the Open era.
She was unable to find any answer to the all-round skills of Swiatek but the 23-year-old, who was competing in the main draw of a grand slam for just the second time, will break into the world’s top 50 on Monday.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here