There has been no “sticking to sports” at the French Open this year.
Novak Djokovic earned a rebuke from the French sports minister for his comments on clashes in Kosovo. Ukrainian Marta Kostyuk was roundly booed after refusing to shake hands with Belorussian Aryna Sabalenka. And Sabalenka, the Belorussian second-seed who won the Australian Open in January, got into a tense exchange with a Ukrainian journalist at her post-match press conference. Sabalenka said, “Nobody in this world, Russian athletes or Belarusian athletes, support the war. Nobody,” but she would not comment on her relationship to Belorussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko; she later said she felt “afraid,” and her next press conference was behind closed doors with the Roland Garros media team.
The defeated Kostyuk didn’t think much of Sabalenka’s statements (and she’s not the only one), saying that she personally knows tennis players who support the invasion. “I feel like you should ask these players who would they want to win the war, because if you ask this question, I’m not so sure these people will say that they want Ukraine,” she said.
Also not sticking to sports: 29-year-old Ukrainian star Elina Svitolina, who grew up between Odesa (which neighbors Crimea, occupied by Russia since 2014) and Kharkiv, the site of one of last year’s destructive battles.* Svitolina briefly refused to play Russians last year, and has declined to shake hands with her Russian and Belorussian opponents this tournament. That her husband is French tennis star Gaël Monfils has made her an honorary Frenchwoman in the eyes of the Roland Garros crowd. She donated her prize money from last month’s Strasbourg International win to a charity for Ukrainian children, and says she’ll do the same with winnings in Paris. Oh, and she has played just a handful of tour matches since giving birth last fall, with a WTA singles ranking of 192 coming into the tournament.
Svitolina’s comeback story has been sweet, but could she keep it going against a top-10 opponent? That was the question on a summery Sunday afternoon at Roland Garros, where Svitolina faced off against No. 9-ranked Daria Kasatkina for a place in the French Open quarterfinals.
Like all Russian and Belorussian players, Kasatkina is playing as a neutral, a cosmetic punishment imposed in part as a result of a demand from Svitolina and the other Ukrainian competitors. The two aggressor countries in Ukraine have produced an enormous number of great active tennis players, and the war has been a live issue at press conferences and in locker rooms since it began last spring. Wimbledon banned Russian and Belorussian players entirely last year, though they will be allowed back in again under the neutral flag this summer.
But not all players have responded the same way. The Russian world No. 7 Andrey Rublev, for example, memorably wrote “No war please” on a TV camera’s glass at a tournament in February 2022. And there’s hardly a more sympathetic figure among them than Svitolina’s Sunday opponent Daria Kasatkina, an openly gay player who has been threatened with Russia’s “foreign agent” label for her opposition to the war. In her box was the Russian pop star Zemfira, who is living in exile in Paris for her own anti-war stance.
From the start of the first set, it was clear: Don’t be fooled by the mismatch in the rankings. The players have faced off six times, and Svitolina, once ranked 3rd overall, has won them all. She broke her Russian opponent to take a 2–1 lead, and she did not let go all set. At her best, the Ukrainian was ruthless and precise, running Kasatkina back and forth to set up a slam or a sharp-angled shot running sideways out of the service box. Svitolina whacked dead balls as if she weren’t getting enough shots in, pumped her fist, and yelled “Come on, let’s go!” to her coach, the former Dutch pro Raemon Sluiter. “Keep your legs going, here we go,” he told her. She served for the set at 5–4, and took it when Kasatkina went long on consecutive points.
Kasatkina, for her part, has a reputation as a grinder—a player whom, as the post-match interviewer put it, you have to beat yourself. But that was not the way she was playing. She hit long over and over again, returned middling serves into the net, and her serving was, to put it kindly, not great, with four double faults and an average second-serve speed of just 61 miles per hour. (At one point, she seemed to hit one too slow for the radar gun.)
The second set was a wild one. It ran 69 minutes; there were eight breaks of serve, a figure that has only been surpassed once in the tournament (after qualifiers) so far. Kasatkina sharpened up, and Svitolina lost a bit of her edge—she lost a match point at 5–4, and then was broken serving for the match at 6–5. But Svitolina prevailed in the tiebreak , 7–5. She won just 80 points to Kasatkina’s 76, but she won them when they counted. Afterward, she said she felt 17 again. Into the fourth round, and on French Mother’s Day, no less.
The victory was at once thrilling and sad. Svitolina basked in a standing ovation; television reporters surrounded her husband in the stands. Kasatkina, not wanting to force Svitolina to refuse her open hand, made eye contact with her across the court, gave her a thumbs-up, and shook the umpire’s hand. I couldn’t hear it over the applause, but apparently the crowd, perhaps not understanding what had happened, or which Russian tennis player they were watching, booed Kasatkina. She left the court so fast the announcer didn’t have time to say her name. Later, on Twitter, she wrote she was “leaving Paris with a very bitter feeling,” and that “the worst part of yesterday” wasn’t losing the match, but leaving it.
Svitolina’s next opponent? The Belorussian, Sabalenka. As luck would have it, Svitolina has gotten three opponents in a row from either Russia or Belarus. Whoever wins the quarterfinal, it’s likely there will again be a tense exit from the court, though Svitolina has bristled at the media’s focus on handshakes and booing, rather than on the war itself. “I want to invite everyone to focus on helping Ukrainians, to help kids, to help women who lost their husbands,” she said. “We are missing the main point that people at this time need help as never before. The kids are losing their parents, they are losing parts of their bodies.”
She did have kind words for Kasatkina. “She’s a brave one,” Svitolina said of her opponent at the press conference after their match. But she had other things to think about, like playing Sabalenka on Tuesday. Gaël Monfils will have to find a babysitter.
Correction, June 5, 2023: This article originally misstated that Odesa has been occupied by Russia since 2014. The city has not been held by Russia since 1991.
