London, Jul 12: Iga Swiatek won her first Wimbledon championship with a 6-0, 6-0 victory over Amanda Anisimova on Saturday in the first women’s final at the tournament in 114 years in which one player failed to claim a single game.
Swiatek’s victory on a sunny, breezy afternoon at Centre Court took just 57 minutes and gave Swiatek her sixth Grand Slam title overall. She is now 6-0 in major title matches.
The 24-year-old from Poland finished with a 55-24 edge in total points and accumulated that despite needing to produce merely 10 winners. Anisimova was shaky from the start and made 28 unforced errors.
Swiatek already owned four trophies from the French Open’s red clay and one from the U.S. Open’s hard courts, but this is first title of her professional career at any grass-court tournament. And it ended a long-for-her drought: Swiatek last won a trophy anywhere more than a year ago, at Roland-Garros in June 2024.
Kate, the Princess of Wales, was sitting in the Royal Box on Saturday and took part in the on-court ceremony afterward.
Swiatek is the eighth consecutive first-time women’s champion at Wimbledon, but her triumph stands out from the others because it came in a stunningly dominant performance against Anisimova, a 23-year-old American who was participating in her first final at a major.
Anisimova eliminated No. 1-ranked Aryna Sabalenka in the semifinals but never looked like she was the same player on Saturday. Not at all. When it was over, while Swiatek climbed into the stands to celebrate with her team, Anisimova sat on the sideline in tears.
All the way back in 1911, Dorothea Lambert Chambers was a 6-0, 6-0 winner against Dora Boothby.
Swiatek never had been past the quarterfinals of the All England Club and her only other final on the slick surface came when she was the runner-up at a tuneup event in Germany right before Wimbledon began.
Swiatek spent most of 2022, 2023 and 2024 at No. 1 in the WTA rankings but was seeded No. 8 at Wimbledon after going more than a year without claiming a title anywhere. She served a one-month doping ban last year after failing an out-of-competition drug test; an investigation determined she was inadvertently exposed to a contaminated medical product used for trouble sleeping and jet lag.
Anisimova, who was born in New Jersey and grew up in Florida, was a semifinalist at age 17 at the 2019 French Open.
She took time away from the tour a little more than two years ago because of burnout. A year ago, she tried to qualify for Wimbledon, because her ranking of 189th was too low to get into the field automatically, but lost in the preliminary event.
Anisimova will break into the top 10 in the rankings for the first time next week. (AP)
