Coco Gauff and Iga Swiatek’s tennis rivalry is one-sided. It’s only just beginning

PARIS — Coco Gauff does not appear to have a ton of major problems in her life.

She has a loving family. She is an excellent tennis player, one of the best in the world. She has lots of friends and countless fans. She travels the world playing a glamorous sport, and at 20 years old, she is already a Grand Slam champion and among the highest-paid athletes in the world.

She does have one major problem, though

Her name is Iga Swiatek, and she is the world’s best female tennis player. On Thursday in Paris, in the semifinals of the French Open, she beat Gauff 6-2, 6-4, for the 11th time in 12 matches.

It’s the sort of one-on-one domination that can drive a player mad.

Each week, Swiatek gets a step closer to becoming the dominant player of the post-Serena Williams era of tennis, especially when it comes to beating one of the players who is supposed to make her work hard to maintain that supremacy. It’s particularly rough for Gauff on the red clay of Roland Garros, but she is pretty certain that Swiatek would beat her on a court made of marshmallows.

“I don’t know if it’s a big difference in our particular head-to-head,” she said about Swiatek’s effectiveness against her.

Tennis has had no shortage of rivalries (or as they turn out, non-rivalries) that have gone this way. Sometimes a player simply has the bad luck of being born at the wrong time, of ripening in an era when basically every other opponent on the other side of the net is manageable. But there’s this one player …

For Maria Sharapova, it was Serena Williams, who was 20-2 against her. Sharapova, six years younger than Williams, couldn’t outlast her. Williams retired two years after she did. For Andy Roddick, it was Roger Federer, who was 21-3 against him. They were born a year apart.

It’s more manageable than what happened to Tomas Berdych, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, David Nalbandian, David Ferrer, Dominic Thiem and countless others, who came up in an era when every other opponent on the other side of the net was manageable, except three, sometimes four.

Some of them even made it through that and found two more young un-manageables waiting for them.

In team sports, being not as good as one other person is solvable with better teammates. Tennis, like many individual sports, is an inexorably cruel endeavor. Someone holds the top spot in the rankings; everyone else holds their inferiority complexes.