Culture
Why Swiatek and Sabalenka's Madrid epic was bigger than the two of them
If there were any lingering doubts about the 2024 clique in the elite of women’s tennis, Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina have erased them in the past three weeks.
It’s a couple of days since Swiatek and Sabalenka produced one of the sport’s great matches on Saturday evening, in the final of the Madrid Open.
Swiatek’s 9-7 triumph in a third-set tiebreak left the world No 1 flat on her back on the red clay of the Caja Magica. It left Sabalenka, the world No 2, slumped in her chair, a towel over her head and face, the very recent memory of three championship points running through her brain.
She hadn’t lost them. Swiatek had mercilessly taken them from her.
This was two days after Sabalenka had toppled Rybakina in a semi-final duel, in another third-set tiebreak that required 12 points for the Belarusian to complete her grinding comeback, 1-6, 7-5, 7-6(5). And it was two weeks after Rybakina had knocked out Swiatek in a semi-final in Stuttgart that also went three sets — at a tournament Swiatek has owned for two years.
Swiatek and Sabalenka’s battle lasted three hours and 11 minutes (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
These women are thisclose right now, and they know it. In such rivalries, wonky measurables like who hits the more powerful forehand or finishes a higher percentage of points at the net don’t determine who wins and who loses as much as intangibles. It becomes a question of who can execute the best shots on the biggest points and, lately, all three of them have done it. In 2024, the top of women’s tennis is tighter than ever.
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“It was more about, you know, who’s going to be less stressed and who’s going to be able to play with more freedom,” Swiatek said in the aftermath of Saturday’s mayhem.
“For most of the match, she played more, like, I felt like some decisions were pretty… how to say it… like, courageous. I was sometimes, you know, a little bit back. So at the end, I just wanted to not do that and to also be courageous.”
This was that rare, special tennis where both players play at their peak at the same time, for long stretches, with a title on the line. A little while after the sting of the initial disappointment, Sabalenka knew what everyone watching did — that she played about as good a match as she could, that nearly every point was a coin-flip, that she had been part of one of the greatest women’s finals ever.
“She just played a little bit better on those key moments,” Sabalenka said. “That’s it.”
Men’s tennis went through nearly 20 years of three guys winning just about everything — Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, with Andy Murray making it a four-way battle during a chunk of the 2010s.
If she can figure out her serve, Coco Gauff could be crashing the current three-way battle at the top before too long. She’s actually world No 3, one place ahead of Rybakina, but hasn’t managed to hit this trio’s heights consistently since winning the U.S. Open by beating Sabalenka last September; in 2024, the other three have forged past her.
It’s been a while since women’s tennis had something like this.
Serena Williams had some worthy adversaries over the years for certain periods — her sister Venus, Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters, Victoria Azarenka — but a sustained troika at the top never really evolved. Since 2017, 18 different women have won 24 Grand Slam titles. The repeat champions – Simona Halep, Naomi Osaka, Ashleigh Barty and Swiatek — have never played the same opponent twice in a Grand Slam final.
Swiatek, Rybakina and Sabalenka are also waiting on that. The only time two of them have met in a final was at the Australian Open last year, with Sabalenka prevailing over Rybakina, again in three sets, in arguably the highest-quality women’s final we’d seen before Saturday in the Spanish capital.
Sabalenka has a 6-3 career win-loss record against Rybakina (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
Maybe that is about to change. Judging from what happened on Saturday, and what has been happening for most of the last two years, there’s a decent chance it will.
“We push each other,” Rybakina said after her loss to Sabalenka, a match in which she was a forehand sitter in the front of the court away from likely locking it up. “We push each other to improve.”
This dynamic will be familiar to fans of that Big Three/Four era in the men’s game, which turned into what tennis writer Matthew Willis accurately coined an ouroboros, each meeting between them, and the different stylistic and psychological battles therein, taking the players involved to greater and greater heights, further and further away from the rest of the field.
This all could last 10 minutes, or 10 years. Sabalenka, who is from Belarus but largely lives in the U.S. city of Miami, Florida, turned 26 on Sunday; Rybakina, Russian by birth, Kazakh by nationality, is 24; Swiatek, the first true great from Poland is 22. (Gauff is 20, and improving every year.)
Injuries, the strain of a relentless schedule, a new crop of young talent, a back-in-form Osaka… many things could render this triangular rivalry obsolete very quickly. It may not even fully develop, with Swiatek having streaked ahead in rankings and titles, collecting 18 in a three-year period in which Sabalenka has four and Rybakina six.
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At the moment though, there is something irresistible about the dynamic between these three athletes, who all bring something different onto the court at first glance, but also subtly carry many of each others’ strengths.
The grass suits Rybakina over Swiatek and, marginally, Sabalenka (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Sabalenka comes with brute force and unmatched intensity, but also a quickly improving net game and the capacity to swipe a match away that she shares with Swiatek.
Swiatek speeds across the court and through her matches with that frightening efficiency, displaying an innate versatility that the others are still trying to acquire — but her prodigious topspin disguises the sheer speed and force of groundstrokes usually attributed to Sabalenka.
Rybakina’s elegant, effortless power and at times gossamer touch make her glazed-eye calm seem less titanium than Swiatek’s focus, but in reality, like her tactical nous, it is just as immovable.
Where this all goes over the next several weeks as the tour moves to Rome and then Paris for the last and biggest clay events of the year, and then shifts to Wimbledon’s grass, is anyone’s guess.
Madrid, where the harder court and the altitude make the ball fly, figured to favor Sabalenka and Rybakina, who are power players, over Swiatek, but she remains queen of the clay. This made that title a key triumph for the Pole — the lone big event on clay she had never won.
Now tennis moves to the slower, more traditional clay courts at the Italian Open and the French Open, which she favors. She’s won at Roland Garros three times in four years. That could spell trouble for her foes.
Conditions in Rome and Paris suit Swiatek (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Then again, Rybakina is the defending champion in Rome. Her breakout win came against Serena Williams in Paris in 2021; Sabalenka was a point away from the French Open final last year before tightening in the crucial moments. She doesn’t do that very often anymore.
After the clay, comes the grass. Swiatek is still a novice on the surface and is the first one to say so. She has said that, at some point in her career, she will dedicate more time to growing more comfortable with its speed and low bounces, but she has not done it yet.
Rybakina won Wimbledon in 2022. Sabalenka frittered away a lead in the semifinals there last year. Her power is a lot to handle anywhere. On grass, it can overwhelm.
Then it’s back to Paris and Roland Garros for the Olympics, and then on to the hard courts in North America, which should favor Sabalenka, the two-time defending champion on the Australian Open’s hard courts and a U.S. Open finalist last year… though Swiatek is the only one of the three to have won at Flushing Meadows, in 2022.
Swiatek, Rybakina and Sabalenka get asked about this second Big Three stuff a lot these days. Usually, they try to shrug it off. That other Big Three have won 66 Grand Slams and may not be done yet. They are on seven. There’s a long way to go, but it’s where they hope this is all headed.
“I’m really happy to be one of these Big Three,” Sabalenka said Saturday night, when she had come second and was trying to grasp a silver lining.
“It’s really motivating me a lot to keep working and to keep improving myself just so I stay there, and then kind of, like, you know, just be there and get as many wins against them as I can.”
(Top photos: Daniel Pockett; Quality Sport Images; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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