After winning the Olympic bronze medal, Swiatek revealed that when she lost in the last four and missed the chance to compete for gold, she felt someone "break my heart" and cried for six hours.
But just one day later, the world No. 1 returned to the same arena and won the bronze medal. After 24 hours of ups and downs, Swiatek admits that when she realized she wasn't playing for herself anymore, she started playing for others when the pressure came down on her, teaching her to show more humility.
Swiatek was very sad when she lost to Zheng Qinwen in the semifinals. She argued with the referee about the end of the match and ended up not shaking hands with the referee. She then left crying in a TV interview and skipped the rest of the media interviews.
In her own words, she picked herself up in time for the bronze medal play-offs and comfortably defeated Schmiedlova 6-2, 6-1 to claim her first Olympic medal. After the victory, the 23-year-old explained how emotional he was before forcing himself to turn things around.
"You won't want to know," Swiatek laughed when asked how she spent the last 24 hours, "To be honest, I don't remember, maybe I cried after winning my first Grand Slam and losing in Australia. It was Roland · Garros in October and then we started the season in Australia and I lost and basically I seemed to cry for at least three days and I think if I didn't play today I might cry for more than a week, so I need to put it in order."
"I probably cried for about six hours. It's really tough. I don't know, sometimes it feels like sports, like tennis, usually I'm able to distance myself from all of that and understand that it's just part of my life, but this time it's like somebody really broke my heart, you know? So to be honest, it's crazy."
But the five-time Grand Slam champion has declared that she will use her Olympic experience as a lesson to learn. She continued, "Because something like this has happened, I know I still have a lot of work to do to understand myself better, and sometimes I understand better what is happening to me. Because I've been number one in the world for so long."
"And this game showed me that that's still not the case. So actually, I'm probably a little too arrogant about myself because I think I've been under so much pressure before and I think I can handle that pressure too, and now I'm motivated to work harder and I think I'm going to be more humble about everything, so I think that will actually make me work better in the future."
This isn't the first time Swiatek has underperformed at the Olympics, as she was in tears when she lost in the second round at Tokyo three years ago. But after facing Zheng Qinwen in the quarterfinals — which she called "one of the toughest losses of her career possibly" — she realized how much she struggled at the Olympics.
Despite her bounce back in the bronze play-offs, Swiatek admits she still had mixed feelings when she sat in her seat after beating Schmiedlova. "When I sat down after the match, I was really confused because I still felt like I lost yesterday and it was a big loss, but on the other hand I won today and it was tough too, so I should be proud of that," she said.
"There were a lot of mixed emotions and still are. I think I'm going to have a few days to digest yesterday's negativity and then they'll pass and I'll remember winning the bronze medal and I hope so, I guess."
As Swiatek tries to learn how to better handle pressure, she will look to a young Grand Slam champion companion as an example. "I'm actually watching Alcaraz and I can see that he's enjoying every minute and it's a great example of how he's actually handling it all," she said with a smile.