Paris Olympics semifinal preview: Can Zheng hold off Swiatek?

The singles semifinals are set at the Paris 2024 Olympics. World No.1 Iga Swiatek continues her march towards yet another triumph on the grounds of Roland Garros, but the surprises that have become typical of Olympic tennis continue to swirl around the top seed. 

Olympics: Scores | Draws | Order of Play

Swiatek will face No.6 seed Zheng Qinwen in the first semifinal, in a match that will renew the burgeoning rivalry between the two young stars. It will be the third meeting between the two this season, with Zheng yet to take a set.

But the last time they played at Roland Garros? Zheng gave Swiatek a hearty scare, taking the first set before capitulating in three. 

In the bottom half of the draw, Anna Karolina Schmiedlova, who became the lowest-ranked women's Olympic semifinalist since tennis returned to the Summer Games in 1988, will face No.13 seed Donna Vekic for a spot in the gold-medal match. 

The semifinal losers will play each other in the bronze-medal match.

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After dominant starts to the tournament, Swiatek and Zheng were pushed to three sets in the quarterfinals on a taxing day when temperatures reached into the mid-90s. Swiatek was a 6-1, 2-6, 4-1 winner over Danielle Collins, who retired late in the third set due to injury. 

Swiatek is the only player still alive that was actually seeded to reach the final four. The World No.1 is effectively playing on home turf. She's won 25 consecutive matches at Roland Garros, including four titles in the past five years and is 39-2 overall on the grounds -- she hasn't lost in Paris since 2021. Her win over Collins in the quarterfinals was her 23rd consecutive win on clay this season.

Zheng prevailed over a retiring Angelique Kerber in a three-hour-plus match, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (6). That gutsy effort came a day after she saved match point to beat American Emma Navarro in the Round of 16.

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Before this week in Paris, Schmiedlova had played more than 700 career matches and managed only one Top 10 win -- over Roberta Vinci in the 2016 Olympics at Rio de Janeiro.

Now the unseeded 29-year-old from the Slovak Republic has done it two more times in two days. On Wednesday she stunned No.9 seed Barbora Krejcikova, the freshly minted Wimbledon champion, 6-4, 6-2. On Tuesday it was a 7-5, 3-6, 7-5 upset of No.4 Jasmine Paolini, who reached the finals of both the French Open and Wimbledon. 

Wimbledon semifinalist Vekic paved her way by pulling off one of the upsets of the week, a straight-sets win over No.2 Coco Gauff in the Round of 16. A day later, she saved a match point to beat Marta Kostyuk 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (8) in a late-night thriller that finished after midnight, becoming the first Croatian woman to make the Olympic semifinals.

There’s something about the Olympics that gets Vekic revved up. Three years ago in Tokyo, Vekic remarkably also won a match against the World No.3, Aryna Sabalenka. And she finds herself in a great run of form. In her two most recent tournaments, she reached the final at Bad Homburg and the semifinals at Wimbledon, her best run at a major. 

But if Vekic loves the Olympics, there's just something about Roland Garros for Schmiedlova. Her favorite memory in tennis is playing in the finals of the 2012 junior tournament, where she lost to Annika Beck. Last year at Roland Garros -- playing in her 38th major singles draw -- Schmiedlova had her best result, a trip to the Round of 16.

“I thought it would be a dream to reach at least the third round here because it’s my favorite tournament, definitely,” Schmiedlova said at the time. “Now I’m in the second week of a Grand Slam so it’s the greatest achievement of my whole career.”

After more than a decade of grinding as a professional, imagine what an Olympic medal would mean. Chances are, it just might surpass that dream of advancing to the fourth round at Roland Garros last year.

In recent years, the Olympics has inspired some surprising results in women’s singles. Look no further than 2016, when unseeded Monica Puig won Puerto Rico’s first Olympic gold medal in any sport. She beat three-time major champion Kerber in three sets. Three years ago in Tokyo, No.9 seed Belinda Bencic defeated Marketa Vondrousova in the gold-medal singles match -- doing something that Roger Federer, Stan Wawrinka and Martina Hingis never did.

What is it about the Olympics that creates such chaos?

For starters, it’s often a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that comes along every four years. Bencic told wtatennis.com that her victory came almost entirely from the surge of nationalism she felt in representing Switzerland. Puig, too, was lifted by that feeling; her father, Jose, emailed her the words to the Puerto Rican national anthem the day before she took gold.

Swiatek, 23, has voiced similar sentiments -- her father Tomasz rowed in the 1988 Olympics for Poland -- and remains the overwhelming favorite to win gold in Paris. 

Carrying the hopes of a nation: Tennis players and the Olympic dream

Martina Navratilova, the 18-time Grand Slam singles champion, says there are myriad reasons for the unpredictability of the Olympics. She checked in on Wednesday from a summer vacation in the Czech Republic, sitting some 200 yards from the tennis courts she played on growing up.

“The Olympics,” she said, “are an anomaly. Everything about it is extra, added on. It’s really a fifth major every four years -- which complicates things for players.”

The favorites, Navratilova said, face two obstacles. Because they tend to go deeper into draws -- most recently at Roland Garros and Wimbledon -- they are generally feeling more physical fatigue than lower-ranked players. The second is the pressure of expectation on elite players -- exacerbated by the few career opportunities they will have to win at the Olympics.

“It’s a combination of the calendar and all that pressure,” Navratilova said. “I was watching the end of the Krejcikova match and she looked exhausted. When you’re that tired, you only have so much emotional energy to play for your country.

“And because it’s not a normal tournament, the logistics are all different. Someone else is running it and the rules are a little wonky. Do you stay at a hotel, a house, the Olympic Village? Do you go home before the event, or stay in Europe?”

Navratilova also mentioned the temptation to play for medals in doubles and mixed doubles. Gauff, for example, was in all three draws. Paolini and Krejcikova are playing doubles as well.

And then there are the surface changes -- from the red clay at Roland Garros to the five-week grass season, then back to clay in Paris. That can sometimes create instability.

With the North American hard-court season already underway in Washington, D.C., Navratilova predicts a rash of upsets at the US Open for all the reasons listed above.

Just look back three years ago. Who won the US Open after the Tokyo Olympics? A qualifier ranked No.150 named Emma Raducanu.