World No.1 Iga Swiatek easily beat Eva Lys at Stuttgart Open to extend her winning streak to 20 matches.
The pole qualified for the quarter-finals with a 6-1, 6-1 win over the German.
On her Porsche Tennis Grand Prix debut, she raced past the qualifier in 1 hour and 2 minutes to notch her 20th straight match victory including her 26th set in a row.
Swiatek landed 18 winners to Lys’s three and dropped just nine points behind her first serve.
Lys struggled to find a way to get the ball past her and her initial strategy of attempting pure first-strike tennis also resulted in a slew of unforced errors to start the match.
Lys showed her best tennis when almost down and out.
She faced a point to lose each set 6-0 but engaged in her grittiest rallies to escape those games and get herself on the scoreboard. It was all too little too late as Swiatek steamrolled to another win.
Swiatek’s set-winning streak is the longest since Serena Williams’s 28 in a row between the 2012 US Open and 2013 Australian Open.
Impressively, thirteen of Swiatek’s sets have been won either 6-0 or 6-1, and she has lost just seven games in her past four matches.
Her match-winning streak is the eight-longest this century, and she is three matches away from tying Naomi Osaka in seventh place.
Jelena Ostapenko was the last person to beat Iga Swiatek in the second round of Dubai in February; since then she has won three consecutive WTA 1000 events in Doha, Indian Wells, and Miami.
She followed all that by spearheading a successful Billie Jean King Cup campaign for Poland against Romania.
The 20-year-old last dropped a set in the fourth round of Indian Wells to Angelique Kerber.
She will likely face Emma Raducanu in the quarterfinals.
The US Open champion put a disappointing string of results behind her to beat Australian Storm Sanders 6-1, 6-2 in her debut at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix.
Raducanu only just played her first-ever professional tennis matches on clay over the weekend representing Great Britain in the Billie Jean King Cup, where she went 1-1 in her team’s 3-2 overall defeat to the Czechs in Prague.
Raducanu’s next challenge is Germany’s Tamara Korpatsch, a lucky loser into the WTA 500 draw.
Getting past her would set her up for a challenging clash with the rampant Iga Swiatek for a place in the semi-finals.
