Clay-court events have been the last holdouts against electronic line calling, in large part because of how well the surface absorbs marks wherever a ball lands. More
How to watch: 9 a.m. on NBC; streaming on the NBC app.Sofia Kenin, the Australian Open champion, is back in her second Grand Slam final of the year and the second of her career. The 21-year-old has had a breakthrough year, which is quite a feat considering she won the 2019 WTA Most Improved Player of the Year Award.Iga Swiatek has been the biggest story of the tournament, reaching her first major final at just 19. She has not dropped a set yet and has conceded only 23 games total. In the round of 16, Swiatek faced off against Simon Halep, the No. 1 seed and the clear favorite to win the tournament, and beat her, 6-1, 6-2, in just over an hour.The two youngsters have some similarities in their games, with both using drop shots to great effect. The cold and often humid conditions of the unusually scheduled French Open have allowed their drop shots to bounce even lower, making them even more difficult for opponents to return. Even if the opponent can dig the ball out before it hits the dirt a second time, Swiatek and Kenin are both excellent volleyers, a side effect of playing plenty of doubles.But the players differ in their groundstrokes. Although each has a varied arsenal with which to keep her opponent on edge throughout baseline rallies, their preferences are distinct. Kenin’s preferred shots are flat, pasted directly into the corners, robbing opponents of the time necessary to set up their own shots. Swiatek relies on a heavier topspin shot, using it to create tightly angled trajectories that expand the contours of the point, dragging opponents from side to side.Both styles have clearly been well served by the clay, and they make for an interesting contrast as the players meet. While a slight mental edge could be given to Kenin because she is already a Grand Slam champion and experienced in the final stages, Swiatek’s run of results cannot be ignored.Either way, the future of women’s tennis is clearly in good hands. More
In six matches at this French Open, no one has come close to finding a solution to Iga Swiatek.Not the No. 1 seed and former champion Simona Halep, whom Swiatek crushed in the fourth round. Not qualifier Nadia Podoroska, whom she routed 6-2, 6-1 in little more than an hour on Thursday in the women’s semifinals at Roland Garros. Swiatek is just 19 with a surname that many people are still learning to pronounce (try Shvee-ON-tek). She is playing in only her seventh Grand Slam tournament and has yet to win a tour title, but she has leapt into the tennis stratosphere in a hurry.“Basically I wanted to play this match as if it would be a first round,” Swiatek said on Thursday. “Because I didn’t want to think I was in a semifinal because it would stress me, so I just kept being aggressive like in the previous matches.”No one has won more than four games in a set against her in Paris this year, and though she is unseeded and inexperienced, ranked just 54th, it will be hard not to consider her the favorite when she takes the court on Saturday for her first Grand Slam singles final against No. 4 seed Sofia Kenin or No. 7 seed Petra Kvitova.Both Kenin and Kvitova, who were to play later on Thursday, already have won major singles titles: Kenin at this year’s Australian Open and Kvitova at Wimbledon in 2011 and 2014.But neither has consistently hit the same sorts of high notes in the last two weeks as Swiatek, whose compact blend of offense and defense has been irresistible.“I’m kind of surprised really,” she said. “I would have never thought at this tournament I would play so good here, but on the other hand, I always knew if I was going to be in the final of a Grand Slam it would be the French Open. So I’m really happy. It’s a dream come true.”Swiatek may end up playing two finals this year. She is in the semifinals of the women’s doubles with American partner Nicole Melichar. The last woman to win in both singles and doubles at Roland Garros was Mary Pierce in 2000.Swiatek, who finished high school earlier this year, is the first Polish player to reach the French Open women’s singles final since 1939 when Jadwiga Jedrzejowska lost to Simonne Mathieu of France. Mathieu now has a court named for her at Roland Garros. More
PARIS — Martina Trevisan’s path to the French Open quarterfinals was harder to negotiate than the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. In a women’s draw that has seen most of the top-seeded players spin out, Trevisan personifies the resilience of those who have found a way through.There were the three qualifying matches that she won just to enter the main singles draw. The questionable line call that went against her while she was trying to serve out her second-round match against the teenage phenom Coco Gauff that she weathered. The two match points against her in the third round against 20th-seeded Maria Sakkari that she withstood. And her first defeat of a top-10 player, which she walked off with on Saturday in the fourth round against No. 8 Kiki Bertens.But nothing 2020 has unleashed on Trevisan — not this year’s French Open draw nor the coronavirus pandemic, which ravaged her native Italy and heavily compressed the WTA Tour schedule — was harder for her to negotiate, she said, than the eating disorder that stilled her tennis career for four years, beginning in 2010.“I know that I have done a great job,” said Trevisan, who recently started to share the details of her harrowing journey, first in July in an athletes’ blog, The Owl Post, in which she described trying to be seen by losing so much weight from her 5-foot-3 frame that she all but disappeared.Trevisan, 26, relishes her Tuesday match against Iga Swiatek, 19, of Poland, not just because of the progress it represents — she had never won a main draw match in a major before last week — but also for the opportunity it presents to help others.“It’s a message I want sent to other people that are suffering right now not to give up,” Trevisan said on Sunday. “Never give up.”Trevisan’s mother is a tennis coach, her father was a professional soccer player in Italy’s second division and her older brother was a top-ranked junior tennis player. By the time she turned 15, Trevisan wrote, she was a high-ranked junior tagged for a bright professional future.In 2009, she reached the semifinals at the French Open and Wimbledon in girls’ doubles, and finished the year ranked No. 694 in women’s singles. Around the same time, her father learned he had a degenerative disease. It consumed his focus, leaving her feeling adrift.His illness, friction with her mother and the increased pressure she felt to succeed overwhelmed Trevisan, who wrote, “I began to feel, strongly, the rush around me to reap all the fruits even before the tree had time to take root.”Trevisan said she wanted to live like a teenager, “recovering, perhaps with interest, all that I felt I had lost in previous years.”She said she resented her muscular body, which made her stand out, and so she began cutting back on her caloric consumption until she was subsisting on a daily diet of less than half a cup of cereal and one piece of fruit.“Only disappearing,” she wrote, “people would be able to see me.”On Sunday, looking back at that time, Trevisan said: “I had a really bad moment, and in that moment I forgot everything about tennis. Tennis wasn’t my life anymore.”Trevisan said she sought inpatient treatment for anorexia after realizing, “I want to live, so step by step I must try.”For four years, her focus, she said, “was on Martina and her life. I take my life in my hands.”In her post, she wrote that she had to re-educate herself about food and “make peace with my wounds.”Tennis became part of her healing. First, it was a means to make money by teaching lessons. Then she began to compete again, but this time in a more healthful manner, without pushing her body until it broke down.“When I decided to play tennis again, it was a new chapter of my tennis life,” Trevisan said Sunday.In 2014, Trevisan returned to the world rankings, at No. 590. Her climb since then has been steady, and she reached No. 153 in 2019. She advanced to the 2020 Australian main draw as a qualifier and lost in the first round to Sofia Kenin, the eventual champion.Trevisan arrived home from a WTA tournament in Acapulco, Mexico, as Italy was locking down because of the coronavirus outbreak. She spent the next five months working on her mental health with a counselor and on her physical conditioning through Skype sessions with her trainer.“Now I’m in the quarterfinal and everything is perfect for me,” she said. “I don’t feel any pressure.”Ranked 159th, Trevisan is joined in the final eight by another qualifier ranked outside the top 100, Nadia Podoroska of Argentina. It is the first time since 1978 that two qualifiers have advanced this deep in the French Open men’s or women’s draw.Trevisan’s opponent, Swiatek, is the youngest player left on the women’s side. Trevisan said she had great empathy for teenagers trying to make their way in a sport where the solo competition can reduce life to what feels like a zero-sum game.In the past few months, she said, she has been contacted by a few other players with disordered eating. “They ask me for help, like what did you do when you felt like this?” Trevisan said. “For me, it’s a pleasure to help. I know I can recommend something, but the work they have to do by themselves.” More
Before Jannik Sinner took his first steps toward scaling the world tennis ladder, he was quickly descending mountains in the Italian Alps.Sinner, 19, learned skiing before tennis, and German before Italian while growing up in South Tyrol, a territory of Austria until World War I that is now known as a placid retreat.He only began to take tennis more seriously at age 13, moving from Italy’s northeast to the northwest to train at the academy of Riccardo Piatti in Bordighera, near the French border.Piatti, who had met Sinner earlier at a tournament in Milan, said he was immediately impressed by Sinner’s courage on the court and his unusual willingness to play proactively rather than wait for his opponents to miss their shots.“He was close to the baseline, hit the ball fast, hit the ball to win the points,” Piatti said of Sinner. “It’s not normal to see players under 13, 14, similar to that.”Piatti said he could see the influence of skiing on Sinner’s tennis game: just as a ski racer must be intensely focused for a race that can last less than a minute, a tennis player be intensely focused for the short burst of each point.“This kind of education he has also in tennis,” Piatti said. “He’s very focused when he plays a point, and after that he relaxes.”His sharp ascent in tennis is the inverse of how he has navigated snowy mountains. Two years ago, he was ranked 870th. Now, Sinner is ranked 75th on the ATP Tour and poised to break the top 50 after reaching the French Open quarterfinals.Should he pass the steep test he faces on Tuesday — 12-time champion Rafael Nadal and his 97-2 record at Roland Garros — the scope of his breakout would magnify.“Not the easiest thing, for sure,” Sinner said of that challenge.Sinner’s biggest career achievement before the French Open came last year, when he won the ATP Next Gen event for players 21 and younger. At only 18, he blitzed the field while playing in a quicker format.This French Open quarterfinal against Nadal will be Sinner’s first match facing any of players who make up the Big Three of men’s tennis, including Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. Still, in the lead-up to the French Open, Sinner practiced on consecutive days with No. 3 Dominic Thiem, the No. 1 Djokovic, and No. 2 Nadal.Nadal said that he has seen Sinner “improving every single week” of the tour.“He has an amazing potential,” Nadal said. “He moves the hand very quick and he’s able to produce amazing shots.”The speed of Sinner’s improvement was also noticed by the sixth-ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas, who beat Sinner in straight sets at the Italian Open last year, then lost to him 16 months later at the same event.“For sure, we can see a great future, see him do good things on the circuit,” Tsitsipas said. “I would not be surprised, yeah, if he has good wins against the top five and the top three. Why not? He has a very big game, a very talented player. I think he is a hard-hitter as well, which makes it difficult.”When Sinner got the best win of his career on Sunday at Roland Garros, beating the recent United States Open finalist Alexander Zverev, 6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3, in the fourth round, his celebration was muted, simply holding up his right fist as he walked up to the net.“Still a lot of work to do,” Sinner said after the match. “Physically, technically, everything. It’s, yeah, a long way.”Piatti said that Sinner’s breakthrough has come in part because he savors the playful elements of the game.“With the professional players, everyone thinks it’s a job they need to do. Him, he loves to practice,” Piatti said.That attitude, Piatti said, has kept the pressure down.“He knows that every point there is a solution and he has a game to find the solution to try to win every point,” Piatti said. “Mental strength is when it’s easy. For him, it’s quite easy, everything that he’s doing.” More
Modern men’s professional tennis does not really do small.The last Grand Slam men’s singles champion who was not at least six feet tall was Gaston Gaudio of Argentina, the 2004 French Open champion. During the past decade, as tennis has become ever more physical, just two men under six feet have even made a Grand Slam final.And yet, the most dangerous man in Paris right now besides Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic may be a steady baseliner from Argentina named Diego Schwartzman, whose listed height of 5 feet 7 inches could be one of the more generous measurements in professional sports.“Very solid,” Schwartzman said on Sunday of his recent play after he disposed of Lorenzo Sonego of Italy in straight sets in the fourth round.That may be one of the biggest understatements since professional tennis resumed this summer. Schwartzman, who has never made a Grand Slam semifinal, has won eight of his past nine matches during the abbreviated season on Europe’s clay courts, his favorite surface, especially this year.In Rome, he pulled off one of the rarest achievements in the game in the past 15 years — a win against Nadal on red clay — before losing to Djokovic, the world No. 1, in the Italian Open final. In Paris, he has won five of 15 sets by a score of either 6-0 or 6-1. He dispatched with Sonego in just one hour, 58 minutes.“Today, Diego was better than me,” Sonego said, stating the obvious, after the 6-3, 6-1, 6-4 rout.Sonego is officially just eight inches taller than Schwartzman, but in reality, the difference is closer to a foot. (I am 5-foot-8. I have stood eye-to-eye with Schwartzman. He is not 5-foot-7.)It is possible that Schwartzman’s parents knew very early that he might excel in sports despite his height — they named him for Diego Maradona (5 feet 5 inches), another undersized sports hero from their country. His nickname is El Peque — a slang term in Spanish that roughly means “shorty” in English.Schwartzman, 28, faces his good friend, Dominic Thiem, the recently crowned United States Open champion and one of the best clay court players himself, in a quarterfinal on Tuesday.Thiem, who has made it clear he has been running on fumes since his marathon U.S. Open final, was stretched to five sets on Sunday in the fourth round by the French qualifier Hugo Gaston, ranked No. 239. Gaston, at 5 feet 8 inches — another relatively diminutive player — delivered a perfect game plan for Schwartzman to follow, frustrating Thiem with his display of spins, drop shots and unrelenting defense.When it was over, Thiem saw Schwartzman cooling down from his match on an exercise bike. Knowing he may need all of the help he can get, Thiem wandered over and gave Schwartzman a pretend whack on the leg.“Obviously, playing like how I’m playing the last two weeks on clay, I have chances,” Schwartzman said.Indeed he does. He knows the circumstances — the schedule, the weather and a switch to what players say is a heavier ball — have aligned to give him perhaps the best chance he will ever have to make a Grand Slam final.The French Open usually takes place in late May and early June, but organizers moved it to this early fall time slot because of the coronavirus pandemic, which largely shut down sports in the spring.In Rome last month, and in Paris the past 10 days, temperatures have been cool, mostly in the mid-50s.The cooler temperatures have had a significant effect on the behavior of the tennis ball, which becomes less lively in colder weather. Also, the tournament organizers switched their ball sponsorship to Wilson from Babolat this year, and players say the new ball is heavier than the old one.Those factors have combined to remove the most powerful arrow from the quiver of anyone who relies heavily on blasting the ball through the court, and helps a relentless and quick defender like Schwartzman, who limits his errors and avoids giving away free points.“This is tough on the big hitters,” said Martina Navratilova, the 18-time Grand Slam champion. “If you are fast and you can run around and go get the ball, you have an advantage. Someone like Nadal, he gets hurt.”For a small player like Schwartzman, a deader ball is a blessing, because it rarely bounces out of his strike zone, and with an extra split second to tee up his shots, he can be incredibly dangerous when his opponents are serving.One of the game’s top returners of serve of late, Schwartzman punished Sonego on Sunday on his second serve, which is becoming a habit. Sonego won just nine points, or 26 percent, on his second serve. As opponents prepare to serve that safer, slower, second ball, they know there is a decent chance that Schwartzman is going to try to jump on it and send it screaming toward the baseline. Norbert Gombos (6 feet 5 inches) of Slovakia, Schwartzman’s third round victim, has been the only Schwartzman opponent in Paris to win more than 40 percent of points on his second serve.Schwartzman has won more than $8 million on tour, but he has never cracked the top 10 and has just three ATP Tour titles in his career. But his ranking has steadily climbed the past four years, far higher than most would have given him a chance in an era when the rising elite of the sport appear to be taller every year.“You never know when your ceiling is going to be there, and you don’t know if you’re going to reach another quarterfinals or reach another final in a big tournament,” Schwartzman said on Sunday. “These tournaments are really nice. They give me a lot of confidence because every year I can improve, I can do a few more things better.” More
PARIS — From behind a glass divider with frosted patterns, the French Open players bare their souls to voices seated on the other side. It is Roland Garros’s version of the confessional, and in the first week of the French Open, players paid more than 158 visits to the boxy phosphorescent rooms and fielded more than 1,083 questions, many from reporters on the other side of the divider, as close to the athletes as the baseline is from the net.“It’s obviously a very strange situation,” said Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria, who is seeded 18th.In accordance with coronavirus-induced self-distancing protocols, players’ face-to-face interviews with most reporters have moved online. Like videoconferencing desk workers everywhere, the participants are adjusting to the new normal while gaining a new appreciation for what is lost in the transaction.“I miss you guys,” Dimitrov said on Saturday night as he sat behind a desk and stared at a checkerboard of faces on a flat screen mounted to a post in the middle of an otherwise empty room.Dimitrov, 29, added that he “feeds off” the “vibes” of a full house of reporters, even when the sentiments they express give him pause, as happened last week when a reporter from a remote location confessed that he was jealous of Dimitrov for dating Maria Sharapova and asked if he had kept in touch with her since their 2015 breakup and her 2020 retirement.Dimitrov gracefully volleyed back the wild lob with a playful reply: “You can still be jealous.”Dimitrov still loves the old-fashioned news conference, perhaps no surprise given that his arsenal includes a classic one-hand backhand. “Whatever insight I can give, it’s not only for me, not only for the audience, but also for the fans,” he said ahead of his fourth-round match on Monday against Stefano Tsitsipas. “One of the things our sport needs a lot more, I would say, is just get closer to the fans.”Tsitsipas, the fifth seed from Greece, appreciates the value of the news media maybe more than most. Tsitsipas, a fan who dabbled in journalism before he became a professional athlete, sat up straighter in his seat when he was asked what he got out of news conferences.“I have something interesting to say,” said Tsitsipas, who went on to describe at some length the Facebook page that he set up before he was a teenager.Ten years later, Tsitsipas, 22, remembers vividly the details of the page he named “Tenniscore ITN,” where he posted news about top players like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. He said he updated the information regularly after poring over the latest tennis results and news of interest. It was the daily assignment he gave himself before he started in on his schoolwork.“I was really into it,” said Tsitsipas, who took great pains not to let his personal biases seep into his coverage.“That is the most challenging part of journalism, isn’t it?” Tsitsipas said Saturday night with a mischievousness that perforated all the barriers between him and his audience.“I think you all know that Roger Federer was my favorite player growing up, but I didn’t necessarily make him a god in my Facebook page,” he said.A beatific smile lit his face. “Everyone was treated the same,” he added.Because he was a novice journalist striving to find a unique way to present his information long before he became a seasoned competitor answering the same old questions, Tsitsipas said he recognized how challenging it could be to give an interview a different spin or present a novel angle.“I do appreciate journalists that come out a little bit more, I would say, unexpected,” Tsitsipas said. “Ask me some other things that don’t relate or don’t have to do with my tennis match, but in a way, in a deeper sense, and kind of unlock something within me in which I can express myself a little bit more open, provide more information. That’s what it is all about: information; getting the best, the most, out of the player.”The virtual news conference, while better than nothing, is not the best vehicle for steering athletes down interesting paths. Interviews are constructed like points in a match. Participants often start out with a planned course of action, but the best will nimbly adjust depending on what is thrown at them.There is a flow, a spontaneity, to a verbal rally that is hard to achieve when there is an audio delay on one end or reporters are fumbling to unmute their microphones — or are cut off by the moderator midsyllable as they try to to nail down an answer with a second question.Then there are the questions so convoluted they require multiple clarifications just so the player can make sense of what is being asked. At 114 words, the fifth of eight questions in the English portion of the Spaniard Nadal’s news conference on Sunday took longer than some of the rallies in his straight-sets victory over the American qualifier Sebastian Korda.It began: “Can you sympathize with us a little because you keep winning so it’s often tough for us to ask you new questions,” and devolved from there. It was nominally about a nifty return that Nadal made on a windswept ball, but pivoted to include whether Nadal had ever lost something that was important to him and did he like dancing off the court.Nadal gamely answered the question about the shot, explaining that in the windy conditions it is important to stay focused and accept that you’re going to make mistakes.“And have you ever lost anything that you have found?” the reporter persisted.“Sorry?” Nadal replied.The virtual news conference, featuring reporters logging in from all over the world, is revealing in its own way, as was demonstrated by the shirtless reporter in one tennis news conference in August. Or by the former world No. 1 Andy Murray at the United States Open when he commented on the plush Pikachu toys on a shelf in one reporter’s video background.On Saturday night, after he stepped down from his news conference, Tsitsipas recorded an audio text to explain the difference in the dynamics now compared with before the pandemic.“The absence of reporters can be felt,” Tsitsipas said, adding: “First of all, the energy you get from each one of them when asking the question, having them in person, it can give you a good or a bad impression. And it can also impact your answer.”Like so much else that used to be taken for granted, the live news conference is a casualty of the health crisis that is appreciated a lot more now that it is gone.“I much prefer the interaction person to person,” Tsitsipas said.Referring to its virtual counterpart, he added: “Who knows? Maybe that’s the future of journalism.” More
Alexander Zverev lost in the fourth round of the French Open on Sunday, but it became quickly clear after the match that he likely should not have competed at all.“I’m completely sick,” Zverev said following his four-set loss to Jannik Sinner, taking the unusual step of leaving his black mask on while seated in an empty room at Roland Garros to answer questions from reporters during a videoconference.“I can’t really breathe, as you can hear by my voice. I had fever as well. Yeah, I’m not in the best physical state, I would say,” Zverev said. “I think that had a little bit of an effect on the match today.”French Open officials said Sunday that Zverev had not shared the details of his symptoms with tournament doctors as he arrived to play, as required by the event’s coronavirus protocols. It is not clear whether Zverev has contracted the virus — he has tested negative repeatedly, though most recently five days ago — but the episode immediately raised questions about the precautions taken by the French Tennis Federation for a marquee event in a country that has seen an uptick in coronavirus cases and recently imposed tighter limits on large gatherings.“Zverev is up-to-date on his tests, which have all been negative,” the French Tennis Federation said in a statement. Zverev’s last test was on Tuesday, with the negative result returned on Wednesday, the federation said. “Today he received a reminder for his next test, to be carried out within five days of the previous results,” the federation said. “He did not consult the tournament doctors before his match.”Zverev said he began feeling sick on Friday night, after his third-round win over qualifier Marco Cecchinato. Zverev said his body temperature reached 38 degrees Celsius, or 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.Zverev consulted with tournament medical officials during the first set of the match who gave him a nasal spray that he used on both nostrils. More
