Iga Swiatek recalls the moment she learned of her positive test: "I was in the middle of a photo shoot with a sponsor"

Iga Swiatek spoke at length to Andy Roddick for his podcast, "Served." In this episode, published Tuesday, the 24-year-old Polish player, a recent Wimbledon champion , discussed a wide range of topics: her serving stats, her adjustments on grass, her backhand, her defeat in the semifinals of Roland-Garros when she was the three-time defending champion, her footwork, and her collaboration with Wim Fissette.

But Swiatek and Roddick had a long discussion about the former world number one's positive out-of-competition test for trimetazidine, which was found in very small quantities in his system on August 12, 2024. This earned him a one-month suspension.

The six-time Grand Slam champion recounted how she learned she was involved in a doping scandal. "I was in the middle of a photoshoot with a sponsor in Warsaw. I checked my emails and saw I'd received a message from this portal, and I thought it was just a reminder to do my whereabouts or something like that... I didn't even read it because I started crying. My agents really thought someone close to me had died. I gave my phone to my manager, and she read everything."

“I didn’t even know if I should continue shooting because my face was all red, I cried for at least 40 minutes, ” she continued, emotional. “But I knew I probably couldn’t tell them anything, so I continued for three hours. And I have to say, those were the best scenes I’ve ever shot, so I must be a good actress.”

"My friends could see that I wasn't injured, but that I wasn't playing, so one of them guessed that I might be in trouble."

After the shoot, she met with members of her staff and hired a lawyer. “Everything was really confusing. I was in a terrible state. I was making jokes, I was being sarcastic, because I had to do something to cope. And then when everyone left, I just cried for two weeks.”

In Warsaw, Swiatek saw friends "who didn't understand at all what was going on. They could see that I wasn't injured, but that I wasn't playing, so one of them guessed that I might be in trouble. I told them. It wasn't easy."