Ash Barty has detailed the immense satisfaction of silencing her doubters as Iga Swiatek savours being crowned tennis's year-end world No.1 for the first time.
Swiatek was on Wednesday officially declared the WTA's 17th different year-ending No.1- succeeding Barty - following a phenomenal eight-title, two-slam season also featuring a 21st-century-best 37-match winning streak.
But while the dominant Pole is being lauded as the undisputed queen of the court, Barty was afforded no such recognition in early 2021 after falling short of the Australian Open final for a second straight year as top seed.
Two months later, ahead of her somewhat anxious return to the global tour after sitting out much of 2020 during the height of the pandemic, Barty was aware of the "chatter" around the legitimacy of her No.1 standing in the women's game.
Naomi Osaka had just won back-to-back grand slam titles in New York and Melbourne, prompting Barty to this week recall the fierce determination she had to prove the critics wrong at the prestigious Miami Open.
"It was probably at a time where I felt some of the doubt really spurred me on," Barty told AAP while promoting her 'My Dream Time' memoir at Melbourne Park.
"I thought, 'You know what, I know I'm deserving of where I am. I've done the work and it's going to have to take someone playing a really good level of tennis to beat me at this stage.'"
As history shows, no one could beat Barty that week - or for much of the ensuing 10 months as the Queenslander also added the 2021 Wimbledon and 2022 Australian Open crowns to her 2019 French Open trophy before abruptly retiring in March as a three-time major winner and still world No.1.
"Yeah, it was a really satisfying week and a really fulfilling week in that sense and turned out to be a catapult to a really dominant period for me for a few months," she said.
As revealed in her book, the "f***ing nightmare" travel ordeal that Barty suffered just to make it to Miami only added lustre to that extraordinary title defence.
It took almost three days, multiple flight delays and cancellations, endless tears, a favour from Chris Hemsworth's travel agent and some extremely good fortune for Barty and coach Craig Tyzzer to arrive in Florida in time.
"Absolutely brutal," Barty told AAP.
"It was a tough way to start what for me was a really terrifying journey. I knew it was going to be a challenging year and I was probably a little bit fearful of what it looked like.
"It was a scary start in the sense that I didn't know if this was the universe telling me I shouldn't be doing it.
"But we got there in the end. You can never really control what happens with travel, right.
"Like, I can't fly the plane myself. There was nothing I could do about it so I just had to accept the situation and wait until we could get to where we needed to be.
"And in the end, we made the most of it for sure."
