Staff Reporter.
Top seed Iga Swiatek overcame a gritty challenge by world No 4 Elena Rybakina to take home the Qatar Open title for the third straight year with a 7-6(8) 6-2 victory in Saturday’s final.
The 22-year-old Pole, who raced to her 12th consecutive match win in Doha after beating Rybakina, became the first player to capture a singles title at an event in three successive years since Serena Williams triumphed in Miami from 2013-15.
The win also improved her head-to-head record over the Kazakh to 3-2, having lost on all three occasions last year.
Swiatek endured a slow start as she went 4-1 down in a roller-coaster opening set before slowly finding her groove to level things up at 4-4.
After the set went into a tiebreaker, the momentum swung back and forth before Swiatek wrapped up the 90-minute-long set with a well-executed backhand winner.
Rybakina had taken a medical timeout after hitting her own leg during the opening set and that seemed to hamper the Kazakh player as Swiatek wasted no time to take the second set and secure her first WTA 1000 title of the year.
“You don’t even know how hard it was not to think about it,” Swiatek said. “I came here and I was just pretty stressed because of that because I felt the expectations.
“But I wanted to just do everything step by step as I always do and again it worked.
“So thank you to my team also for keeping me on the ground and focusing on the right stuff, because achieving that is great. I’m really happy and really proud of myself.”