Iga Swiatek will finish a season without a Grand Slam title for the first time since 2021, and the clearest sign of why came at the US Open. She led Qinwen Zheng 5-0 in the opening set of their fourth-round match, then lost it 7-5 and the second set 6-3. The glaring problem was her return. Zheng is not known for her serve, yet Swiatek won only 20 points on it.

She went looking for a fix in Beijing, and she found it with the player widely regarded as the best returner in history. Before the tournament began, video from the practice courts showed Novak Djokovic, who is back at the China Open for the first time in 11 years and went on to win a seventh title there, taking the six-time Grand Slam champion through his return stance. After she beat 10th seed Iva Jovic 6-1, 6-3 on Wednesday to reach the quarterfinals, Swiatek was asked about the lesson from a man who had just left the court with his seventh trophy. 

“Oh my god, yeah, he’s a GOAT,” Swiatek stated in the post-match conference. “And what he’s showing, you know, season by season, such a great consistency, and as you said, seventh title here, it’s unbelievable. He’s, you know, putting up the numbers that are really unhuman, but he’s showing that it’s possible, and he’s really, you know, amazing, so determined and so motivated.”

“He’s for sure a role model for all of us, and congrats to him,” she added. “And yeah, I wish, you know, he could teach me a little bit longer how to return, because I feel like he’s the best returner. But everything, you know, he says, it’s super nice, because he’s also really open, and it wasn’t the first time I had a chance to ask him about something. It’s really good to see players like that also wanting other players to improve, you know, I feel, so he’s really nice, and I really appreciate that.”

The advice Djokovic shared with the former world No. 1 was that he now uses a wider base with his feet slightly open, and that the position has changed over his career. Moreover, the Serbian shared that he used to bend forward, and just a few years ago he started leaning back in an upright position to find the middle ground. 

The numbers suggest the advice, or at least the attention to her return, has had an effect. Across her four matches at the US Open, Swiatek won 25, 21, 35 and 20 points on return. In Beijing she has won 29, 49 and 36, and the 36 came against Jovic, who won only 14 return points of her own. 

A similar problem appeared at Wimbledon, where she lost to Alexandra Eala in the third round while defending her title. She said that day that it was “much tougher to return a serve like that than a normal serve,” referring to Eala’s slow delivery.

Djokovic’s mentorship ambition

Djokovic has been helping the WTA’s top players for a while. Aryna Sabalenka hit with him at Wimbledon in 2025, when he joked that her game lacked intensity and was too flat, and she later pointed to their hour-long chat when she won the US Open. Jovic, the player Swiatek beat on Wednesday, calls him her idol and has said he makes time for young players and wants to help them. His willingness to share what he knows has also fed the idea that he will coach once he retires.

At the US Open last year, he joked that his post-retirement plan is to coach Joao Fonseca and that he would be “very expensive.” 

For Swiatek, the next test is Elise Mertens, the 13th seed, who beat Coco Gauff 6-3, 6-3 in the round of 16. Swiatek leads their head-to-head 2-0. 

The Pole won the title in 2023, beating Liudmila Samsonova in the final, and her only title this season came at the Canadian Open. Another one here would carry 1,000 points and a big boost for her WTA Finals hopes. She has qualified for the last five editions, but before the tournament she sat 10th in the Race with 3,584 points, 650 behind eighth-placed Linda Noskova. Noskova’s Wimbledon title this year effectively moves the cutoff up a place, which makes a run to the Beijing final even more important.

If Djokovic’s lessons keep working, Swiatek’s season may still end better than it started.