Reigning champion Iga Swiatek had a tough start to her 2026 Wimbledon journey. Taylor Townsend almost knocked her out in the first round. Swiatek buried her head in her towel for several minutes after she won a 6-1, 2-6, 6-3 battle against Townsend in 2 hours and 2 minutes.
Swiatek hasn’t reached the semifinals of a Grand Slam in her last three tournaments since winning Wimbledon. Townsend’s power-hitting almost pushed Swiatek to the brink of a major disappointment.
“It was a tough couple of weeks, not a season where everything went how I wanted,” Swiatek explained in her on-court interview. “I don’t think I won any three-set match this year, so I’m happy that I could do it here, because obviously it means a lot opening the court as defending champion.”
“I just felt that maybe it wasn’t so easy for me to accept that I was losing some sets this year,” Swiatek said in her press conference. “Especially that some of them just slipped out of my hands a little bit. But today I had more calm in the third to overcome this, and I knew how to play, so I really leaned on that.”
“Overall, maybe I am sometimes more tense,” said Swiatek. “It’s not easy to get rid of that. You can sometimes see on the serve, the quality goes down. But I think you can see that in many players, because serve is the most complicated motion. It’s easy to mess it up a little bit.”
“But for me, the most important thing is that I served better in the third set, that I got through this. I know what I did wrong a little bit, so I’ll try to have just more clarity in these moments to try to reset again, and try to serve with the quality that I have on practice and that I also had at the beginning of the match.”
“Sometimes just serving the ball might be a tough ask,” Swiatek recalled in her on-court interview. “This game for sure was about that, and about believing that I can do it.”
Swiatek’s journey doesn’t get any easier as she is set to face 2021 champion Karolina Pliskova, who defeated 19-year-old compatriot Tereza Valentova 6-3, 6-4. While Swiatek holds a 3-0 record against Pliskova, Karolina is coming off a quarter-final at Queen’s and a semifinal in Nottingham. The 2026 Wimbledon will also be the first time they meet on grass.
World No. 2 Rybakina also had to dig deep to secure a win in the first round against a motivated Lois Boisson. Elena won the match with a late break in 1 hour and 48 minutes. She secured the win with a 6-4, 1-6, 6-3. The victory marked her 300th WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz match win.
“It was a really difficult match,” Rybakina said in her on-court interview. ” I’m also not coming from too many wins (recently), so I really had to fight. Hopefully the next round is going to be better. I need to improve quite a lot, but I’m happy to get another opportunity.”
She was playing quite high, I would say, for a grass court,” Rybakina said in her post-match press conference. “For me, it was difficult to actually adjust to these higher balls. And then getting short slices was a bit challenging. In the end, I’m happy that I managed to win it. I definitely will need to work more on these kinds of things.”
Rybakina became one of four players to reach the second round at Wimbledon in each of the past six editions, joining Iga Swiatek, Barbora Krejcikova, and Elise Mertens. She has been undefeated in her last 14 Grand Slam opening rounds overall, last losing to Clara Burel at the 2022 US Open.
She will face Caty McNally next. They are 1-1 head-to-head. In their most recent meeting in Beijing last year, Rybakina won in a tight three-setter. This will be their first meeting on grass.
