Iga Swiatek blames WTA calendar for upsets after Mirra Andreeva Dubai defeat

DUBAI—Iga Swiatek renewed her criticism of the WTA calendar after her quarterfinal defeat to Mirra Andreeva at the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, asserting the busy schedule played a part in the early exits suffered from top players in the Middle East.

“I'm not surprised,” Swiatek said of the upsets, which include second- and third-round losses from Top 3 colleagues Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka, respectively.

“For sure it's a calendar thing. Like, we're not going to be able to be consistent for many years playing week by week.

“But I feel like for sure the calendar is not helping,” the world No. 2 added, conceding the existence of a stronger overall field of players. “Again, like, we need to switch continents, we need to switch surfaces, we need to switch the balls. Yeah, it's not easy.”

Honestly, I'm not that direct usually, but I would blame this performance on the lack of practice before because I didn't have time. Iga Swiatek

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.”

Swiatek has already endured a busy 2025 season, parlaying a successful week at United Cup into a semifinal run at the Australian Open. The tight turnaround from Melbourne, according to the Pole, factored into her arriving under-cooked to Dubai and Doha, where she reached the semifinals last week.

“Before I lost in Australia early, so I had time to do some stuff. This year I didn't,” Swiatek told me on Thursday.

“Honestly, I'm not that direct usually, but I would blame this performance on the lack of practice before because I didn't have time.”

The former world No. 1 will only have about a week to rest between Dubai and the start of the Sunshine Swing, where she is defending a BNP Paribas Open title in Indian Wells.