Amanda Anisimova and Iga Swiatek both will be aiming to win Wimbledon for the first time when they meet in the women’s final.
Saturday’s title match at Centre Court is the first for Anisimova, a 23-year-old American, at any Grand Slam tournament. She had taken a several-month career break in 2023, exhausted, she said, by the relentless demands of elite competition.
Swiatek, a 24-year-old from Poland, already owns five such trophies, going 5-0 in major finals, but never had been this far on the grass courts of the All England Club. She’s been the champion on the French Open’s red clay four times and on the U.S. Open’s hard courts once.
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The final is scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. local time, which is 11 a.m. EDT. Kate, the Princess of Wales, was scheduled to attend the match in the Royal Box and take part in the trophy ceremony afterward.
Swiatek is listed as the money-line favorite at -250 by BetMGM Sportsbook. Anisimova is at +210.
They’ve never played each other as pros. Both were stars as juniors: Anisimova defeated Coco Gauff for the 2017 U.S. Open junior title, while Swiatek was the Wimbledon junior champion the next year.
Whoever wins Saturday will be the eighth consecutive first-time Wimbledon champion.
Swiatek spent most of 2022, 2023 and 2024 at No. 1 in the WTA rankings but is seeded No. 8 at Wimbledon after going more than a year without claiming a title anywhere. She served a one-month doping ban last year after failing an out-of-competition drug test; an investigation determined she was inadvertently exposed to a contaminated medical product used for trouble sleeping and jet lag.
Anisimova, who was born in New Jersey and grew up in Florida, was a semifinalist at age 17 at the 2019 French Open.
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A year ago, she tried to qualify for Wimbledon because her ranking of 189th was too low to get into the field automatically, but she lost in the preliminary event. She ousted the world’s No. 1 female tennis player, Aryna Sabalenka, on Thursday in the Wimbledon semi-finals — shocking the sports world.
Anisimova returned to the tennis circuit about 12 months ago, and when asked about her journey after beating Sabalenka, she said, “To be honest, if you told me I would be in the finals at Wimbledon, I would not believe you.”
Anisimova will break into the top 10 in the rankings for the first time next week, no matter what happens Saturday.
