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The first time that I really paid attention to the game of French Open finalist Maja Chwalinska, yes you read that right, was in Oeiras. It was a WTA125k event and she was just rolling the ball high across the court against Simona Waltert.
Ball after ball after ball, it was the exact same thing in the early stages. Unusually high, unusually slow forehands, mixed it with the most odd-looking chip returns and slice backhands. Waltert snatched at one of those moonballs, if I may, and fired a thunderous forehand to break the Pole’s serve right at the start. Any other player would have buckled and tried to change tactics. Not Chwalinska.
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The opening service game was the only one that the Pole lost en-route to a 6-1, 6-0 victory. Don’t get me wrong, Waltert is a criminally underrated claycourter (ask Danielle Collins). But even the lanky Swiss had no answers to the balls landing at shoulder height or simply dying down into the clay on each of her opponent’s shots.
Chwalinska went on to win the title in Oeiras, beating the likes of Beatriz Haddad Maia and Sinja Kraus in the process. At $19,900, the prize money would have been just enough to ensure a comfortable one-week stay for her and her team in Paris. And that’s all she wanted at the time: to get through the French Open qualifying week and maybe win a round or two in the main draw.
Alas, when she got to Paris, Chwalinska kept winning. The qualifying week went by quickly and her hotel booking was extended. Then came the main draw and she was still on a roll. Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen, the seasoned Elise Mertens and Maria Sakkari all fell victim to Maja’s magic and suddenly it was her third week in the French capital. That’s when it dawned on her:
“I hope there are like, free places out there… Or I have enough money, you know? Because I know I earned a lot here, but it’s not coming right away, you know guys? Let’s see, pray for me,” Maja Chwalinska said during her on-court interview after beating Maria Sakkari in the third round.
See, it’s common knowledge that players only get paid after the tournament is over. Chwalinska had already raked in $307,678 by the fourth round (close to half her entire career earnings of $861,237), but the cash flow problem quickly spiralled into a viral story.
The Pole is now a Grand Slam finalist now. With a guaranteed $1.48 million (and possibly more if she wins the summit clash), cash flow is probably not something she will have to worry about — not for the foreseeable future at least. But beneath the hotel bills and the fun banter is a story of every Tour hustler. Let’s dive in.
Don’t let Maja Chwalinska’s magic at French Open go down in vain
Maja Chwalinska has been a revelation this week. She is one win away from becoming just the second qualifier ever, after Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open, to win a Grand Slam. As any hard-working first-timer, she has kept her head down, underplaying her own skills:
“Let’s not pretend someone expected it,” Maja Chwalinska said after making the French Open final. “I mean, I was outside top 100, and now I’m in the finals of a Grand Slam, so I feel like it’s a big thing. So it’s hard to process it.”
Well, I had, in these very columns, predicted a near repeat of Iga Swiatek’s similarly endearing run at the 2020 French Open. So, I take slight umbrage to the Pole underselling us on her very obvious talents.
Jokes apart, what Chwalinska has managed to accomplish this fortnight is extraordinary, a fairytale as most would put it. Her measured game is a breath of fresh air, almost a return to some of the older ages.
When the 24-year-old hit her forehand in Paris, it was 61% higher than most others. Such high clearance over the net meant that her errors rarely hit double digits throughout sets, sometimes entire matches even. And when she switched to the backhand, it was a slice 31% of the time on average. Against big-hitters like Anna Kalinskaya, the figure reached up to 46%.
Chwalinska just wasn’t giving her opponents any pace to work with. They were either being pushed into uncomfortable positions with the high bounce or forced to hit up on the ball and create their own pace. On clay, the tactics worked wonders.
With nearly 53% of the points won when defending, the Pole tops the leaderboard at this year’s French Open. And let’s now be quick to dismiss her approach as “passive” or boring. She’s hardly either.
The amount of shape that Chwalinska puts on the ball and the margins that gives herself also mean that the winners that she hits are some of the cleanest. There’s no “did it catch the line” or “it just brushed over the net”. In simple words, there’s no luck involved. When she’s lining up to hit a winner, you know it will be a sweet strike, the kind that she has had many of this fortnight.
The Pole outshone opponents like Diana Shnaider and Dianne Parry in the winner count and has more than asserted herself from the baseline. Vindication on there being more ways than one of winning big in tennis, and a French Open final, are her rewards.
It’s easy to get lost in the rags to riches stories, but those who go through it all, hardly ever forget how the rags felt. So let’s not forget to look deeper. Chwalinska has not lost a completed match in nearly two months. She has played, and dominated — without a flashy forehand or stinging serve — against nine opponents over three-weeks of non-stop tennis.
As an increasing number of players continue to advocate for a fairer prize money share, here at the French Open more than anywhere else in recent memory, let’s first decide to not wait for fairytales to celebrate Chwalinska and her ilk. Not all Chwalinskas get their fairytales and they shouldn’t need one. It’s their grit and tennis genius, not their long awaited win on the big stage, that makes them endearing.
So, maybe take a walk past the show courts, maybe even skip Chwalinska’s French Open final against Mirra Andreeva. Instead, buy a ticket to the qualifiers. And maybe drop by Simona Waltert’s match before she flips the script at Wimbledon?
Edited by Vedant Chandel
