Iga Swiatek asserts it is ‘smart to not care’ about controversial WTA Tour rules

Ewan West 29 Sep 2025 4:00 PM

Iga Swiatek in a press conference

Iga Swiatek has described the WTA Tour mandatory event rules as “pretty crazy” and declared that she may have to choose tournaments to skip in order to remain healthy.

The six-time Grand Slam champion’s latest comments come after she described the calendar as “overwhelming” and asserted that tennis stars “play too much.”

The WTA‘s Mandatory Commitment policy dictates that players who are ranked highly enough must play all four Grand Slams, all 10 WTA 1000 tournaments and a minimum of six WTA 500 events in a season. Players receive a 0-point score in their ranking calculation if they miss mandatory events.

Swiatek progressed to the last 16 at the China Open in Beijing when world No 83 Camilla Osorio was forced to retire with injury after the Pole took the opening set 6-0.

In her press conference, Swiatek was asked about the high number of retirements in Beijing and whether she will protect herself by being selective with her scheduling for the rest of 2025.

“Yeah, I think it’s a smart question ’cause obviously the season is long,” said the world No 2.

“The second part of it, I think people are more fatigued. For sure, unfortunately I think the Asian swing is the hardest part because you feel like the season is going to finish soon, but you still need to push.

“For me, like, I don’t know yet how my career is going to look like in couple years. Maybe I will have to choose some tournaments and skip them, even though they are mandatory.

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“Yeah, like WTA with all these mandatory rules, they made this pretty crazy for us. I don’t think any top player will actually be able to achieve this, for example, playing the six 500 tournaments. It’s just impossible to squeeze it in the schedule.

“But yeah, I think we have to be smart about it, not really, unfortunately, care about the rules and just think what’s healthy for us. Yeah, it’s tough.

“The only thing I can do now, when I decided I’m going to play all these mandatory tournaments, is to just take care of my body, take care of the recovery. I have a good team around me also that is helping me with that.

“I’m experienced enough to know kind of what to do. So physically I am good. But yeah, there are a lot of injuries. I think it is because the season is too long and too intense.”

Swiatek added: “For sure, I’m sorry for Camila because she’s always giving her 100%. She told me she got injured at the beginning of the match. It’s always pretty sad to see that because we want to just compete. She wasn’t able to.

“But overall, like besides that, I feel like I played good in the first set and really used my game to push Camila, yeah.”

The 24-year-old will face 16th seed Emma Navarro in the fourth round.