The Transformation of Elina Svitolina

Sometimes it is hard for Elina Svitolina to find the motivation to get on a tennis court. She wakes up and checks the news from Ukraine, and she sees that Odesa, where she was born, has been bombed, or that another swath of Kharkiv—the city where she turned herself into the greatest player Ukraine has ever produced, and which is just miles from the Russian front—is in rubble. She thinks about her grandmother, who still lives in Odesa, and worries about the rest of her family and her friends who have been under siege for four years. So Svitolina takes inspiration where she can: in the idea that her grandmother will be following her match that night, or in the awareness that she represents her country and that Ukrainians need something to cheer for. Sometimes she reaches for something closer. She FaceTimes with her three-year-old daughter, Skaï, who stays back home in Switzerland, where she attends preschool, and Skaï tells her to “win against the lady.” She looks forward to calling Skaï the next morning and saying that she did it, she won.

Lately, she has been beating a lot of the ladies. In early May, she won a tournament in Rome, beating three of the top four women—Elena Rybakina, Iga Świątek, and Coco Gauff, all former Grand Slam winners—along the way. Now ranked No. 7 in the world, she has defeated all the players ranked above her at least once. And she’s a contender to win the French Open, which begins today. But she told me that she was not thinking about the title when we spoke last week, the day before she left for Paris. She was focussed on recovering, physically and mentally, from the exhausting two weeks in Rome, which had required her maximum effort. Then, as the adrenaline began to kick in, she would focus on her first match, which, by a cruel quirk of the draw, would be against the Hungarian Anna Bondar, who is something of a nightmare opponent for Svitolina, having beaten her at the U.S. Open last year and again in Madrid only a few weeks ago. If Svitolina does make it past Bondar, she’ll think about the second round, and if she wins that match, then she’ll worry about the match after that, and so on.

Every player says some version of this—one match at a time!—but Svitolina says it a little differently. It’s not a matter of protecting herself, psychologically, from the burden of expectations but, rather, of making space for them. Her time is valuable, and she does not want to waste it. Every moment requires her fresh attention.

When she was younger—before she married the talented, charismatic French player Gael Monfils, before she left the tour for a time to have a baby, before her homeland was invaded—she was focussed on trophies. She wanted them, and wanted them fast. “Results, results, results,” as she put it to me. And her results were good: she won that title in Rome twice; won the World Tour Finals, which is contested by the top players of the year; and made her way toward the top of the game, peaking at No. 3. But she was another player back then, almost another person, perhaps; a fighter, still, but of a different type. She was a defensive-minded counterpuncher, fast and athletic but something of a grinder. Reliability and consistency were her hallmarks—admirable qualities, but unexciting. A powerful player could blow her off the court.

Then she married Monfils, who is famous for his shotmaking and beloved on the tour. Russia invaded Ukraine, and, eight months later, Svitolina and Monfils had Skaï. When she returned to tennis, less than six months after Skaï was born, she seemed galvanized. She had a platform and a purpose—and, strikingly, a new playing style. She had seen that the game had evolved. “It’s more about who takes the earlier opportunities,” she told me. To keep up, and to move ahead, she needed bigger groundstrokes, an attacking forehand. She needed to be more efficient. The shift was partly born out of necessity, she told me. Now thirty-one years old, she still has élite speed, but she knows she can’t run as well as she could when she was twenty. She has to shorten points. “Of course, it’s not always possible to do it in the best possible way, but I’m really trying to force myself to be really brave on some decisions,” she said. “Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t.”