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Poland rallying behind its best-known athlete, who is unafraid to be true to her heritage on the world stage.
Most of the world's sporting superstars are typically sponsored by a small group of big businesses. The American behemoth Nike is a prime example. Sunday's men's finalists, Jannik Sinner of Italy and Carlos Alcaraz of Spain, as well as Aryna Sabalenka from Belarus and Jack Draper from Britain, are all sponsored by the company. Novak Djokovic, the Serbian who has won Wimbledon seven times, is sponsored by the French fashion house Lacoste for an estimated €8 million a year.
But Swiatek, who is now world No 4 and entered Wimbledon this year as the
eighth seed, agreed to a sponsorship deal a little closer to home. While her all-white kit also bears the logos of the Indian tech company Infosys and the Swiss sports brand On, her primary sponsor since May has been Oshee, a Polish energy drink company based in Krakow.
In Polish supermarkets, brightly coloured bottles of Oshee with Swiatek's face plastered on the label are priced at four zloty each, or about 80p. The value of the deal, with the biggest sports beverage company in Poland, has been kept secret.
“I'm a global athlete and foreign companies are also interested in me, so we can, in a sense, make more tactical choices,” she said in a 2023 interview with the Polish outlet Grupa PZU. “I turned down
several nice offers precisely because sometimes the values of some companies are not necessarily in line with mine.”
Swiatek's net worth, estimated by Forbes at about £18 million, will have been boosted by Saturday's prize money of £3 million.
She ended a sponsorship deal with Nike in January 2020 after the company reportedly refused to provide kit for her whole team. Eight months later, she won her first grand slam. An Oshee spokesman said her presence in the Wimbledon final was “an important voice for Poland on the international stage”.
Swiatek grew up in Warsaw with her parents and older sister, Agata. Her father, Tomasz Swiatek, competed in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul as a quadruple sculls rower, placing seventh. Her mother, Dorota, is an orthodontist.
Tomasz described his daughter as a “restless” child, who started tennis to compete with her sister.
When Swiatek was a teenager, her family struggled financially. “There was a moment when I was against the wall. There was a moment when I earned enough money to earn my bread and butter, but there was nothing extra,” Tomasz, who was his younger daughter's first tennis coach, said last year.
Aside from Wim Fissette, her new Belgian coach who was
. Poor Animisova.
