Maja Chwalińska, the qualifier who had to survive her own breakthrough

Maja Chwalińska

Photo: Peter Menzel / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 11, 2001 Miechów
Occupation	Tennis Player

Maja Chwalińska plays tennis the way the women’s tour was supposed to have stopped playing it. She is short by the standards of the circuit and does not hit opponents off the court. She slices, she drops the ball short, she sends back the shot that was meant to end the point, and she waits for the other player’s patience to run out before her own does. Jaroslav Machovsky, the coach who took her on when almost nobody was watching, has summed up his first impression in a sentence: she played too slowly, but there was something in her. What her season has been testing is whether that something can survive being found.

She grew up in Dąbrowa Górnicza, an industrial city in Poland’s southern coal belt, and came up through Polish junior tennis alongside a girl her own age from Warsaw: Iga Świątek. They became friends and doubles partners. Together they led Poland to a European junior team title, were European junior doubles champions and reached the girls’ doubles final at the Australian Open. Then the two careers split so sharply that the split became the frame through which Polish fans saw her. Świątek went on to collect six Grand Slam titles, four of them in Paris. Chwalińska kept losing in qualifying.

The gap stopped being a statistic in 2021. Chwalińska, born in Miechów on 11 October 2001, was 19 when she announced that she had been living with depression since the end of 2019 and was stepping away from the court. Five years later she described what that had looked like without decoration. “I just couldn’t get out of bed anymore. I was just lifeless, to be honest,” she told reporters in Paris. “I knew that I need to take a break, because otherwise I’m just not able to live.” She did not know whether she would come back. The pause lasted about four months, and when she returned it was with the same game and a different relationship to it.

The rebuild was slow in every sense. Machovsky has been in her corner since 2020, when her manager Piotr Szczypka put them in touch, and he stayed through the break. She qualified for Wimbledon in 2022 and beat Kateřina Siniaková for her first main-draw win at a major, then spent most of the next three seasons on the tour’s second tier, winning WTA 125 titles in Florianópolis in 2024, Montreux in 2025 and Oeiras in April 2026. The top 100, her stated goal for the year, stayed out of reach. She arrived at Roland Garros ranked 114th, needing three qualifying wins just to reach the draw.

What followed has no precedent in Paris. She went past Zheng Qinwen, the Olympic champion, then Elise Mertens, Maria Sakkari and the French hope Diane Parry, beat Anna Kalinskaya in the quarter-finals and Diana Shnaider, who had just knocked out the world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, in the semi-finals. She became the first qualifier ever to reach a Roland Garros final and only the second in the Open Era to reach any major final, after Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Mirra Andreeva beat her 6-3, 6-2 on 6 June. The fortnight paid her $1.61 million, more than she had earned in her entire career, although during the event she struggled to cover her Paris hotel, because prize money arrives only once a tournament is over, until the Polish drinks brand Oshee stepped in. That Saturday night, at a sold-out Silesian Stadium in Chorzów, Dawid Podsiadło, a pop star from her own Dąbrowa Górnicza, had his audience sing “Sto lat” for her. On the Monday she rose from 114th to 21st in the rankings, inside the top 100 for the first time.

The fairy-tale version of the story usually stops there, and it leaves out why the doubts that followed were not unreasonable. Remarkable as it was, the Paris run did not include a win over a top-10 player; every seed she beat was seeded in the twenties. Her coach has called what she plays a very old-fashioned tennis that does not fit current templates, a style built to frustrate rather than to overpower, and the summer showed what that costs when a match turns physical. At Wimbledon, entered on a wild card yet seeded 20th, she led the Thai qualifier Mananchaya Sawangkaew 6-2, 5-2 and held match point when she slipped and rolled her right ankle. She had it taped and refused to retire. “It’s Wimbledon. I didn’t want to retire at Wimbledon,” she said, after losing 2-6, 7-5, 6-2 as the first women’s seed out of the tournament. The ankle cost her Hamburg, and she went out in the first round of the US Open singles. At home, where her Paris fortnight had been treated as a national event, columnists were soon pleading for patience, and she later admitted the tone had reached her.

The answer came in Asia. In September she reached the semi-finals in Singapore, beating Mertens again, this time as the defending champion, before losing to Leylah Fernandez, and climbed back to 21st. In Wuhan, seeded 16th, she beat Mayar Sherif, Marie Bouzková, Iva Jovic and Sakkari to reach her first WTA 1000 semi-final, where the opponent was Świątek. Chwalińska won 7-5, 6-1, her first victory over a top-10 player, against the friend whose career had been held up for years as the measure of her own. In the final she dropped the first set to Britain’s Sonay Kartal, ranked 170th and back from a spinal stress fracture, then won 2-6, 6-4, 6-2 for her first title on the main tour. “I felt that people can be very harsh on me,” she said afterwards. “It affected me. In the end I’m only human.” On 19 October she rose to No. 11 in the world, the highest ranking of her career.

She does not seem in a hurry to perform the role that comes with that number. During Paris she said she was keeping her distance from social media — “I post, and then I quit” — and after Wuhan she pulled out of Ningbo, writing that the previous two weeks had been very demanding physically and that her body needed to rest and recover. Her ranking puts her among the seeds for the Australian Open in January. For a player whose whole method is making opponents hit one more ball, the next test is a familiar one: whether it still works now that everyone knows it is coming.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis, WTA, Iga Swiatek, Mirra Andreeva, Roland Garros, Wuhan Open, Maja Chwalińska, Sonay Kartal