Clijsters and Roddick agree Swiatek was right to stop. Their reasons differ

Iga Swiatek has ended her 2026 season early, and two former stars have backed her. Kim Clijsters says it is “the wise decision”, while Andy Roddick argues that a six-time major winner should not care about qualifying for the WTA Finals. They reach the same verdict by different routes.

What happened

According to Tennis Up To Date and Tennis365, Swiatek injured her left thigh in her Wuhan Open semi-final against Maja Chwalinska, losing 7-5, 6-1. She withdrew from the Ningbo Open, which ended her hopes of qualifying for the WTA Finals, and then said she would not play again this year. Tennis365 reports it is the first time since her breakthrough in 2020 that she has not seen out a season.

Swiatek explained her reasoning in Tennis365’s report: “The past few months, or actually the past couple of years, have been incredibly intense and I feel I need to rest and recover my body fully.” We looked at what she needed in Wuhan in our WTA Finals race piece.

Clijsters: listen to your body

Speaking on the Love All podcast, Clijsters said the decision would not have been made lightly. “I’m sure that she’s thought it through in great detail,” she said. “For her to come up with a decision like that, it didn’t take just a few minutes.”

Her argument looks ahead to 2027. “Is it worth pushing it for these last few weeks and knowing that it could maybe make it worse or it could have an impact on what’s coming up in 2027?” she asked. “So, in that sense, I do think it’s the wise decision.”

Clijsters also cautioned against assuming the public knows everything. “Do we know all the details about it? Maybe it’s worse than what she’s explaining or addressing,” she said. She drew on her own experience of making an injury worse by assuming it would be fine on court, and said of Swiatek: “Good for her for kind of listening.”

Roddick: the ranking is the wrong target

Roddick’s comments, made on his Served podcast and reported by Tennis365 earlier this week, are about priorities rather than the body. He argued that Swiatek’s career is already secure: “She has as many slams [Stefan] Edberg, [Boris] Becker, [Maria] Sharapova, Kim [Clijsters], like she is already great and will forever live as an all-time great.”

For Roddick, a six-time major winner should treat the tail end of the season as “the most unimportant parts of the year”. “Your focus and your priority is not am I [ranked] 10, am I [ranked] eight, it’s getting ready so that you can ramp up and try to win a slam next year,” he said. He also suggested that her habit of working at full intensity every day has served her well, but that “at some point there has to be a breath”.

Same verdict, different reasoning

Clijsters’s case is medical and cautious: a small injury can grow if a player pushes through it, and the cost lands in the next season. Roddick’s is strategic: the points and the year-end event do not matter much beside a major title. One is about risk, the other about reward.

Both depend on information the public does not have. Swiatek has not disclosed every detail of the injury, as Clijsters notes, so nobody outside her team can say how serious it is. Roddick’s argument is also made with the benefit of her record. It is easier to dismiss a year-end tournament when you have won six majors than when you have not.

The test comes in January. If Swiatek arrives in Melbourne fit and rested, both pundits will have been proved right in their different ways. If the thigh problem lingers, Clijsters’s warning about the cost of pushing on will look more like foresight than caution.