The 2024 French Open has its first week in the books, as the round of 16 begins in the men’s and women’s singles draws today. Here, The Athletic looks at the takeaways from the opening seven days in Paris.
Thank goodness for the Lenglen roof…
A sensational start. A debut for the ages. A bright future at the top of the game in every sense.
If pushed to select a star of the first week, it has to be the roof on Court Suzanne-Lenglen. New for this year, having a second covered court has made an enormous difference, with the roof used every day so far. It has prevented the scheduling chaos of the last seven days from becoming scheduling turmoil.
The design, which is inspired by French tennis legend Lenglen’s pleated skirt, allows for some ventilation compared to a typical tennis roof design, preventing things from becoming too humid and uncomfortable.
All hail our new roof overlord.
Without the roof, this year’s tournament would have looked very different. (Bertrand GUAY / AFP)
Roland Garros needs an upgrade
That might sound strange given everything we just said about that fancy new roof — but there is a serious need for another show court on the grounds.
Court Simonne Mathieu was a lovely addition a few years back, with seating for 5,000, but beyond that the field courts leave much to be desired, with seating for just a few hundred. Some players and fans love the vibe of having big players on tiny courts, but others are less sure that a Grand Slam tournament should feel like playing in the Bois de Boulogne just over the road.
Also, tournament sells thousands of grounds passes , but the general admission seating in Suzanne-Lenglen and Simonne-Mathieu is very limited. That means fans that come to the tournament can spend hours in line waiting to get into a match on cozy Court 14, and the viewing options are severely limited if there are no seats available on a specific court.
A day at Roland Garros can be an amazing excursion. The grounds are teeming. There’s money rolling in. Time to invest in something that serves the workaday fan.
(Charlie Eccleshare / The Athletic)
Naomi Osaka is coming for tennis
Several days have passed now since Osaka nearly sent Iga Swiatek home in the second round, failing to close out from 5-2 up in the third set.
She’s still the talk of the tournament. And Osaka wasn’t even supposed to do this. “I’m a hard-court kid,” she said after it was over.
Her tennis has been getting closer and closer to what it was when she was winning her four Grand Slam titles. She thinks it’s better, because it has to be to keep up with Swiatek and the other women at the top of the game. She might be right. She’s hitting an open-stance backhand, a shot that didn’t used to be in her arsenal. Her serve against Swiatek, until the last bits, looked as good as ever.
(Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
She reiterated after her loss that, impatient as she is for results, she remains focused on being fully back in form in September. Judging from her performance this week, she may be ahead of schedule.
She’s committed. She’s happy. She’s coming.
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From wide open to normal service
A week ago, it looked as if this was going to be a wild, wide open tournament on the men’s side.
Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner were managing injuries. Novak Djokovic hadn’t really played good tennis all year. Alexander Zverev, the most in-form player, was attempting to win a Grand Slam while a trial got underway in Berlin on charges that he abused a former girlfriend in 2020.
All were supposedly ripe for the picking.
Seemingly not.
Carlos Alcaraz appears less inhibited after his forearm injury. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Alcaraz has dropped just one set. Sinner hasn’t dropped any. Djokovic has been clinical for two matches; against Lorenzo Musetti, he resurrected himself from a position of desperation like he has done so many times before. Zverev got pushed to five sets by Tallon Griekspoor, too, but managed to come back from two service breaks down in the fifth set, prevailing in the deciding tiebreak.
All are in separate quarters of the draw. That makes for a pretty closed tournament entering the final 16. The only opening is whether Djokovic can recover from a finish at 3:06 in the morning, but it might also be just the sort of charge he needed all along.
The same has remained true on the women’s side. Despite a few upsets, the top 4 are all still around in the second week, which hasn’t happened since 2013. It adds even more credence to the theory that women’s tennis is getting its Tetris blocks aligned into a generational scrap, and if Osaka gets involved, things will get very exciting indeed.
Swiatek is still the player to beat. (Matteo Villalba / Getty Images)
Doubles
The rain has been a massive pain for everyone involved at Roland Garros, but players-wise, it’s been those in the doubles draws who have been worst affected.
Singles will always take priority, and so doubles players have had to wait day after day after day to play their matches. Sometimes more than that: some were scheduled to play first-round matches on Monday, and didn’t end up doing so until Friday. As the tournament enters the second week, there are still first-round matches to be played in all three doubles events.
Generally the players in question were phlegmatic about it, but as Jamie Murray put it on Friday: “The last few days have really killed people’s motivation to be around here”.
French duo Nicolas Mahut (left) and Quentin Halys. (Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP via Getty Images)
On Saturday again, it was the doubles matches that were all cancelled in the afternoon, leaving the tournament with a huge backlog.
Doubles players being deprioritized is no surprise, but this week has been another reminder of how much they are considered second-class citizens in the sport.
Stefanos Tsitsipas?
It can be easy to forget that Stefanos Tsitsipas is a former finalist here. A finalist who led the title match by two sets to love against Novak Djokovic.
Since that 2021 run, he’s had less fun in Paris. He went out in the fourth round the following year, and was brutally pulverised by Carlos Alcaraz in the quarter-finals 12 months ago, a defeat whose manner appeared to cow him for nearly that entire year.
Winning the title in Monte Carlo in April served as a reminder of how much of a threat he can be on clay, and he has backed that up with a very impressive first week here — dropping just one set in his three matches. Tsitsipas appears more at ease with himself than he often does, and said after his third-round 6-3, 6-3, 6-1 win over Zhang Zhizhen on Friday that the Monte Carlo success had been a turning point for him.
The Greek looks more secure on clay. (Bertrand Guay / AFP via Getty Images)
“Not having a win in a few months and regaining my strength and walking away from Monte Carlo with a victory, it brought me back into a great mindset of I have now this under my belt, and I can really proceed with great confidence towards the next clay court tournaments,” he said.
Tsitsipas has generally flown under the radar, but much more of this and he’ll be hard to miss in the second week. Especially as he’s still in the mixed and men’s doubles events, as well as the singles.
Three-set thrillers
The story goes that to be considered equal, women and men need to play the same amount of tennis: five sets each. Same work, same pay.
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There have been a few titanic five-setters at this tournament, for sure — Djokovic and Musetti; Daniel Altmaier and Laslo Djere; Dusan Lajovic and Roman Safiullin; Flavio Cobolli and Holger Rune. But it’s not possible to have watched Iga Swiatek and Naomi Osaka and come away with the thought, “yes, what this needs is two more sets.” And they’re not the only ones.
The concentrated jeopardy of a three-set match is simply a different kind of challenge to a five-set one; in the latter, it’s possible to groove in, to find some feel and then raise the level just before things get hairy. Francisco Cerundolo provided a great example on Saturday, losing the first set to Tommy Paul but using it as a testbed, in order to settle himself, before running away with the next three.
Try that in a three-setter, and you can be a point away from disaster before you know it. The early stages of the women’s draw have produced some stunning matches, many of which have turned on the at-times sickening brevity of both the format and the ten-point tiebreak that ends it if things are all square. Olga Danilovic and Donna Vekic, Beatriz Haddad Maia and Elisabetta Cocciaretto; Peyton Stearns and Lucija Ciric Bagaric, all some of the matches of the tournament so far.
Then there are those that maybe aren’t classics, but are a reminder of the sheer pressure of playing a Grand Slam. Mirra Andreeva and Victoria Azarenka’s seesaw third set late at night, and, in match that went two sets, one point in Clara Tauson’s match against Sofia Kenin. Kenin was a set down and serving to stay in the match at deuce.
Tauson took control of the point, and had a sitter forehand right by the net to finish off the point and move one point away from victory. She struck it… straight to Kenin, who was on one side of the court, with little power. Tauson was on the same side, so the space was gaping. Kenin merely had to deflect it back. So she did, and the ball looped into the air, and time appeared to stand still. This writer let out an indescribable noise.
It dropped long. Tauson broke and won.
Tell us your first-week takeaways, and what you want to see in the second…
(Top photos: Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP; Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)
