For a while there, it seemed that Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek would divide the spoils. Sabalenka would dominate on hard courts, and Iga would continue her reign on clay.
At the moment, Aryna is taking it all. She has held the number one ranking for six months now, opening up an astonishing 4,300-point gap on the field. She picked up her third Madrid title on Saturday, straight-setting Coco Gauff shortly after Gauff dealt Swiatek one of her worst-ever clay-court losses. My Elo ratings not only put Sabalenka atop the field, they rank her first on clay. By Elo, at least, the Belarusian will be the favorite at Roland Garros.
Some of this can be explained by Swiatek’s struggles. But Sabalenka has long been ready to seize her chance. Here are her career tour-level results by surface:
Surface W-L Win% Hld% Brk% TPW% Hard 244-79 73% 75% 37% 53% Clay 74-29 72% 74% 38% 53%
This is not the snapshot of a player with a strong surface preference. She has reached ten career clay-court finals, winning three and losing four to Iga.
On the other hand, all three tournament victories (and more final) came in Madrid. Four more of the finals were in Stuttgart. Both events have historically favored bigger hitters: Madrid with its altitude, and Stuttgart with its predictable indoor conditions. Rome and Roland Garros present different challenges.
So, is Sabalenka the new queen of clay, or is her domain limited to the Spanish capital? Is she really the woman to beat in Paris?
Surface sensitivity
Here’s a further breakdown by clay-court event:
Event W-L 1st% 2nd% RPW DR Roland Garros 16-7 67.4% 44.5% 47.7% 1.15 Rome 9-6 65.4% 44.2% 44.3% 1.04 Madrid 23-4 69.9% 50.6% 44.9% 1.19 Stuttgart 13-5 69.9% 47.5% 43.2% 1.12
(DR = Dominance Ratio, percentage of return points won divided by serve points lost.)
Madrid stands out as Sabalenka’s playground, and Rome is clearly not her favorite tour stop. But her cumulative stats at the French Open, where she has reached only one semi-final and one other quarter, fit better with the tournaments where she has reached so many finals.
You probably remember Aryna’s tough 6-7, 6-4, 6-4 loss to Mirra Andreeva in last year’s final eight. I had forgotten that it was her fifth straight three-set exit in Paris. Two years ago, it took Karolina Muchova more than three hours to advance to the final. Back in 2020, Sabalenka won more points than Ons Jabeur did in their third-round meeting, yet it was the Tunisian who moved on.
The parade of narrow losses isn’t a case for the Queen-of-Clay title–after all, Iga would’ve won some of those matches in about 56 minutes. It’s merely a reminder that the world number one has often been close. She is playing somewhere near her best-ever tennis right now, so if the improved form carries over to Roland Garros, it’s easy to imagine those close matches finally tipping her way.
Surface insensitivity
Here are some (men’s) surface-speed ratings from the last 52 weeks. Stuttgart is a women’s only event, so I’ve included Hamburg as a rough approximation:
Year Event Surface Speed 2024 Roland Garros 0.66 2024 Rome 0.67 2024 Madrid 0.82 2024 Hamburg 0.89
(I use men’s data for surface speed because the metric is based on ace rate. Men hit more aces, so there’s better data to assess court conditions.)
Tour average, across all surfaces, is 1.0. Speed ratings in the 0.8 to 0.9 range are slow-ish, but they’re more like a slow hard court. For instance, the men’s Masters event in Montreal last year rated a 0.8, almost identical to Madrid. Point being, there is a clear separation between the traditional clay events and the upstarts. It would stand to reason that a big hitter like Sabalenka would struggle more in Rome and Paris.
Despite the trophy count, surface effects don’t show up where I would expect to find them in the stats. The Match Charting Project–thanks to one unhealthily obsessed contributor–has logged almost all of Aryna’s tour-level matches. Based on that data, here are her average rally lengths by event:
Event Avg Rally Roland Garros 3.54 Rome 3.25 Madrid 3.30 Stuttgart 3.14
Sabalenka has defied the slow dirt at the Foro Italico. She has somehow played even shorter points there than in Madrid. We can give some credit to her opponents–she has faced Jelena Ostapenko, Dayana Yastremska, and Danielle Collins there–but even her 2022 match with Iga registered just 3.1 strokes per point.
The same trends–or lack thereof–show up in her serve stats. The next table shows the rate at which Sabalenka’s serves are unreturned, and the percentage of points that she wins with either her serve or her second shot:
Event Unret% <=3 W% Roland Garros 27.2% 46.9% Rome 31.6% 49.0% Madrid 30.4% 49.6% Stuttgart 36.0% 54.0%
Though Stuttgart is a server’s paradise, the gap between Madrid and Rome remains slim. Looking at these numbers, you’d never know that Sabalenka had three titles at one of the events and a 9-6 career record at the other. At the very least, it seems that the slow clay has not prevented the Belarusian from playing her game.
The dropshots
Last year, Sabalenka clay-court game changed. She hit more drop shots than ever, especially in Rome and Paris. My deep dive showed that the tactic was a success across multiple dimensions:
Clay-Sabalenka got the best of both worlds. She won more points by playing the drop, and she won more points because of the tactic’s lingering effect. Perhaps because of her growing reputation as a drop shot queen, the effect has persisted since June, even when she doesn’t go to the well so often.
In theory, dropshots give opponents something to think about, and the positive effect of a good dropshot goes beyond a single point. It’s hard enough to handle Sabalenka-level power. Thinking you might have to dash forward makes it even worse. The post-dropshot effect doesn’t work for everybody–it is neutral for Ons Jabeur, for example–but it has made Aryna even deadlier.
Expect droppers galore in Rome. Sabalenka unleashed eleven in the Madrid semi-final against Elina Svitolina and another eleven on Coco Gauff in the final. She won 14 of the 22 points. If it works in Madrid, it will almost definitely continue to score points on the more stately surfaces in Rome and Paris.
Sabalenka’s new weapon remains a minor tweak, but it has clearly been a positive one. Few women gain so much from dropshotting as she did on slow clay last season.
Coronation?
All of this adds up to Sabalenka being the Roland Garros favorite–mathematically if not emotionally. If she is the new Queen of Clay, it’s only by default. Swiatek is a generational talent on the surface: If Iga can play her best, Aryna will be lucky to push the final to three sets.
The case for the world number one, then, is more prosaic. Who could beat her? A resurgent Iga, of course. Andreeva could cause problems again: Perhaps no one else on tour can better neutralize the Sabalenka serve. Ostapenko could blitz her way through, as she did in Stuttgart, but she is even more of a threat to Swiatek than she is to Sabalenka. The luck of the draw is a very real factor when the Latvian is lurking.
The next two weeks in Rome won’t overturn any of this, but they could refine the narrative. If Iga coasts to a fourth Italian Open crown, it will be tough to bet against her in Paris. If Aryna comes out on top, she would head to the French as more than just a mathematical favorite. If Ostapenko wins it, well, that would be pretty funny.
* * *
Subscribe to the blog to receive each new post by email:
Heavy Topspin