Tag: Tennis

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This article is part of the launch of extended tennis coverage on The Athletic, which will go beyond the baseline to bring you the biggest stories on and off the court. To follow the tennis vertical, click here.

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Getting ‘bagelled’ in tennis is a humiliation.

To not win a single game suggests a mismatch, that one of the players is either out of their depth or having a terrible day on court.

Bagels — as sets that end 6-0 are known, because the zero looks like one — are seen as such an embarrassment largely because they are so rare. Twelve per cent of WTA Tour matches in 2023 included a bagel, according to data from Opta.

In just five years on tour however, world No 1 Iga Swiatek has shattered this orthodoxy.

During 2023, Swiatek won a bagel set in 29 per cent of her matches. That’s almost one in three. Her total of 23 bagels for the year was 15 higher than the players with the second-most on the women’s tour — Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula, both with eight. Excluding matches Swiatek played in, the average for the WTA Tour last year was a bagel set in just 11.4 per cent of matches, according to Opta.

For Swiatek’s WTA career as a whole, an average of 40.6 per cent of her matches have included either a 6-0 set or a 6-1.

That’s a bagel or breadstick in close to half of her tour matches — you can see why the term “Iga’s Bakery” has entered tennis parlance.

Heading into the looming French Open, where Swiatek is a three-time champion and winner of the past two tournaments, she shows no signs of slowing down. In 2024, Swiatek has won the most bagel sets (eight) of anyone on the WTA Tour, ahead of Gauff (seven) and Aryna Sabalenka (five).

In her last two events — winning the title in Madrid and also in Rome — Swiatek has dished out three bagel sets. And as The Athletic showed last month, her number of bagels per week while world No 1 stacks up against the greats — bettered only by 18-time Grand Slam champion Chris Evert.

But how does she do it? Using data from Hawk-Eye and speaking to the players who have to face her each week, including world No 3 Gauff, world No 4 and Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, and Grand Slam winners including Victoria Azarenka and Marketa Vondrousova, here are the staple ingredients at Iga’s Bakery.

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Iga Swiatek’s 100 weeks as world No 1: The streak, the slams, the bagels

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To regularly win bagel sets, you have to be solid in all areas, particularly in returning well enough that every game is about who is the better tennis player, rather than the better server.

Swiatek is a master of this, and that’s why she is so good at running away with sets.

“She doesn’t have any holes in her game,” says world No 11 Daria Kasatkina, who has lost in straight sets the last five times she’s played Swiatek. These include a 6-3, 6-0 defeat in Doha, Qatar two years ago.

“In tennis in general, that’s very important. She returns very well, and though sometimes she can have some troubles on serve, generally she’s very stable in all aspects. She can switch from defence to attack very quickly. So for me, this is one of her weapons. And mentally, she is very strong.”

Vondrousova, the world No 6 and reigning Wimbledon champion, has played Swiatek three times and is yet to win a set, suffering a bagel and two breadsticks. “If she’s on fire, there’s not much you can do. She doesn’t have a worse side to try and hit,” Vondrousova says.

Having accumulated over 100 weeks as world No 1, Swiatek’s base level is clearly outstanding — even in sets she doesn’t win to love or one. But is there anything she does especially differently when running away with it?

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Using Hawk-Eye data, The Athletic has sorted Swiatek’s sets played into bagels and those that were 6-2 or closer.

In her bagel sets, Swiatek produces more unreturned serves: 31 per cent compared to 27 per cent. Her service games get quicker by 17 seconds on average as a result; her return games, meanwhile, speed up by 16 seconds.

This supports what the eye-test says. Watching Swiatek put another bagel in the oven, it feels that things are spiralling quickly out of control for her opponent. This is demonstrated by the average length of return games, which are three minutes and 18 seconds if it’s game one of a bagel set; four minutes and 48 seconds if it’s the third game; and three minutes and three seconds if it’s the sixth.

By this point, whoever Swiatek is playing is seemingly thinking, ‘Please, make it stop’, and is almost happy to get off the court. By the sixth game of a bagel set, Swiatek hits her returns four miles per hour faster on average than in game one — reflecting a higher level of aggression as she motors towards the finishing line.

Overall, Swiatek returns far better in sets she wins 6-0 than in the ones that are 6-2 or closer. She returns 88 per cent of first serves and 92 per cent of second serves in the former, compared to 79 per cent and 84 per cent in the latter.

As well as getting more balls in play, she returns more aggressively in bagel sets. Her first-serve return hit point is closer to the baseline (12.2m from the net compared to 12.4m) and her first-serve return net clearance is lower (87cm compared to 92cm).

These are small numbers in isolation, but put together they add up to Swiatek strangling her opponents’ game.

“I felt like her depth was so good from the first ball,” world No 16 Madison Keys, who in the past few weeks has lost 6-1, 6-3 to Switaek in both Madrid and Rome, says of that first meeting. “She makes you feel like you can never get your foot on the gas. And then, all of a sudden, you’re the one backing up off the baseline, and that’s not a scenario you want to find yourself in. You don’t want to be behind the baseline trying to run.

“She puts you in a tricky position because you feel like you have to go for something you don’t want to and then you’re threading the needle between going for something that could be dumb but also feeling like it’s kind of the only thing you can do.”

Players don’t just struggle to stay with her — she takes matches away from them.

When Swiatek is rolling, she gets more clinical.

Break-point conversion rises to 67.9 per cent in bagel sets from 54.7 in closer ones, and she wins 31.5 per cent of converted break points with a winner, compared to 26.1 per cent. In general, Swiatek’s winners as a proportion of her points won go up in bagel sets (from 26.1 per cent to 28.9), as do points won from forced errors (17.2 per cent up to 18.5 per cent).

As Keys explained, a lot of those forced errors come from players feeling like they have to go for more than they are really comfortable with.

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What is striking about all these data points is that Swiatek’s groundstrokes don’t change all that much.

Her average forehand speed is the same (75mph), as is her average backhand speed (70mph). The spin rate is a bit higher during bagel sets on both the forehand (2476rpm compared to 2416) and on the backhand side (1965rpm compared to 1901), but not by much. Her average net clearance is similar on both wings as well.

This suggests that the sequences where Swiatek rolls through games are as much about momentum and flow as they are technique. The dominance becomes self-fulfilling once she wins a few games, and she and her opponent both feel like they know what’s coming next, so the starts and ends of points become more inevitable; what happens in between is less important.

Additionally, Swiatek is not a player who eases into tournaments — she often racks up thumping wins early on, which although they are theoretically against weaker opponents, still send out a message to her rivals and make her even more ominous as she moves through a draw.

One of Swiatek’s predecessors as world No 1, Naomi Osaka, who lost 6-4, 6-0 when the pair last met two years ago, says it’s “incredible” how Swiatek can keep delivering point after point, week after week: “It’s something that I honestly can’t fathom from back when I was No 1 for like five seconds.”

“It’s her ability to play one point at a time that puts a lot of pressure on her opponents,” says two-time Australian Open champion Azarenka, who has lost 6-4, 6-0 and 6-4, 6-1 to Swiatek in their two most recent meetings. “Not many people can figure it out.”

Keys, who has beaten Swiatek previously but has also suffered a 6-1, 6-0 defeat on top of those recent losses, agrees: “Her intensity is basically unmatched by anyone else. She’s on you every single point.”

Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion who was beaten 6-4, 6-1 by Swiatek in that year’s French Open final, describes her as “super intense”. During that run at Roland Garros four years ago, Swiatek won a breadstick set in six of her seven matches.

This psychological torture doesn’t stop when they get off the court.

Swiatek’s opponents — and would-be opponents as draws unfold — find themselves in a vicious cycle: the more bagel sets she wins, the more they fear them, and the more likely they become.

Players are actively having to try to block out this reputation she has when preparing to face her.

“I think if you start thinking, ‘Ah, maybe I’m gonna get a 6-0 from Iga’, then you’ll probably end up getting one,” three-time Grand Slam finalist Ons Jabeur, who lost the pair’s most recent meeting 6-1, 6-2, told The Athletic this week. “Getting that kind of karma.

“Not thinking like that is the most important thing. She’s such an amazing player, but you should always think about yourself and not get into that mindset.”

This is easier said than done.

Her opponents have a hard enough time managing their mental state before accounting for the fact that Swiatek is a master of diagnosing it from the other end of the court, feeding off it, and taking their mind as much as their body. She is an elite problem solver, having been a gifted mathematician at school; once she has figured a player out, there is very little they can do.

Gauff, who has lost 10 of her 11 meetings with Swiatek (including 6-1, 6-3 in the French Open final two years ago) and has been bagelled by her three times, agrees: “When you’re playing her, you shouldn’t worry about the results in the previous matches, because every day is a new match and a new opportunity. I think if you play her thinking about her results, then you probably (already) lost the match.

“I just approach every match as a clean slate. I think it’s even more important when you’re playing against somebody who has done well in the past, just because you don’t want that to affect how you play.”

How hard is that to do?

“For me, not that hard,” Gauff says, “just because I feel like in the past, with the way my career has gone, I played a lot of big names early. I think I just got used to separating the name from, I guess, the match. So for me, it’s not that difficult. Obviously, playing Iga herself is difficult. But I guess that aspect doesn’t affect me when I’m playing her.”

Rybakina, who has a 4-2 winning record against Swiatek, says it’s about being focused for every single point: “You have to constantly be saying to yourself what you have to do.”

To try to crack the code though, we turn to Jelena Ostapenko — the all-or-nothing Latvian who has an astonishing 4-0 winning record against Swiatek. How does she not only avoid getting bagelled by Swiatek, but actually find a way to beat her every time?

“That’s my top secret,” Ostapenko replies, with a grin. “I’m not going to say anything.”

OK, but how hard is it to live with her when she gets going? “That’s my secret,” she repeats.

Time to put the bagel slicer away.

And even if Ostapenko did reveal her secrets, knowing what to do to stop Swiatek is one thing; pulling it off under pressure is quite another.

As tennis turns to Paris for this year’s French Open, Iga’s Bakery arrives in the viennoiserie capital of the world very much open for business.

(Top photos: Patrick Smith; Clive Brunskill/Getty Images; design: John Bradford)

This article is part of the launch of extended tennis coverage on The Athletic, which will go beyond the baseline to bring you the biggest stories on and off the court. To follow the tennis vertical, click here.

Last month at the Madrid Open, Coco Gauff was warming up on the least desirable practice courts when she saw some male players — without small numbers next to their names — on the much better courts.

Gauff is familiar with the misogynist history of the tournament. She partnered with compatriot Jessica Pegula against Victoria Azarenka and Beatriz Haddad Maia in the women’s doubles final in 2023, after Azarenka and other players commented on unfair scheduling and the size disparity of birthday cakes for Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka.

Officials refused to let the foursome speak after the match.

Gauff said she had seen progress this year. But she couldn’t help but notice the weirdness: she, a Grand Slam champion and the world No 3, was warming up at an event just one rung below the U.S. Open on “really bad” courts.

“When you look out on the practice court and you see guys who are ranked 30 or 40 spots lower than you on the court, you’re like ‘OK, what happened?’” she said a few days later.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal. She played her match on the top court, in a desirable time slot. There are plenty of benefits that Gauff and a handful of other women at the top of tennis enjoy, including prize money and endorsements that can reach into the tens of millions of dollars.

Still, to exist as a female tennis player in 2024 is to endure what can feel like endless slights: the micro-aggressions baked in; the structural inequality foundational to a sport run mostly by men; stark set-piece examples of inequality that can be hard to comprehend and harder to endure, for their magnitude, their reasoning, or more commonly both.

“I get a little bit frustrated here because I feel some tournaments in Europe can fancy men more than women,” Ons Jabeur, the two-time Wimbledon finalist from Tunisia, told The Athletic in Madrid.

“I see that especially on social media, more posts about the men, more this more that and for me it’s really frustrating because we play really well. And it’s such, you know, an amazing sport for women. So I wish we can be more seen,” she said.

“I think we deserve better.”

It’s not just Europe.

Jabeur, 29, just finished playing the Italian Open, where the women competed for a prize pool of $5.5 million. The men’s equivalent was $8.5 million.

In August, the men and women arrive at the Western & Southern Open in Mason, Ohio. The men play for $7.9 million; the women for $6.8 million, even though the tournament owner, Ben Navarro, has a daughter, Emma, who plays on the WTA Tour.

A tournament spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The knee-jerk reaction is that women don’t bring in as much money as the men, and if they did they wouldn’t be second-class citizens. Yet consider a counter-narrative: during the 55-year history of the sport’s modern era, if women had received the same exposure and investment as men, and didn’t have to confront countless barriers and aggressions, maybe they would be bringing in the same amount of money.

Consider that more generally, the WTA Tour’s most lucrative route to additional funding centers on being in lockstep with the ATP Tour men, over letting Saudi Arabia, a country where women do not have equal rights, pump money into tennis.

How else do elite women get the short end of the racket handle in the sport to which they dedicate their lives?

Let us count — just some of — the ways.

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Tennis’ top women say the sport is broken. This is why

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Ever the bridesmaid

It’s the final weekend of a Grand Slam tournament. The women’s singles final takes place on the Saturday. The climax arrives 24 hours later, with the men’s final.

It’s been that way basically forever. There’s an implicit message that everyone in tennis, from the little girl who just started taking lessons to the world No 1, receives.

Tournament officials often say it has to be this way. The men play best-of-five sets in the Grand Slams; the women play best-of-three. (We’ll get to that. We have thoughts.)

Whoever plays the final on Saturday has to have one day during the tournament where two players compete on consecutive days, between the second day of quarter-finals and the semi-finals. Since the men play longer matches, it wouldn’t be fair for their semi-finalists to have to play on consecutive days, would it?

Perhaps not. The French and Australian Opens now stretch their first round over three days, and the other Grand Slams could follow suit. Surely there is a permutation that allows the men and women who have reached the late stages of the peak of their sport equal rest?

Of course, there are also television contracts that exist — television contracts that get renegotiated all the time. If there is a will, perhaps there is a way.

If there is a will.

Darren Pearce, chief spokesperson for Tennis Australia, said they have looked at a swap and will continue to do so. They moved the women’s final to Saturday night in 2009 to maximize domestic exposure, but they have to consider time zones and international exposure as well. Pearce cited Australian Ash Barty’s win in 2022 as an example of the Saturday offering “so much more coverage and exposure in Australia.”

The U.S. Open has looked at swapping the two finals “in an effort to optimize viewership and interest,” said Brendan McIntire, a USTA spokesperson.

Last week (Wednesday May 15), ESPN announced that its free-to-air broadcaster, ABC, will show the U.S. Open men’s final, though the women’s final the day before will remain on the pay channel, ESPN, because ABC has contractual commitments to college football that Saturday.

The U.S. women’s final has outperformed the men’s final four of the past five years in television viewership, and the men’s final competes with the opening weekend of the NFL. In this case, the second-class spot may be a blessing.

A Wimbledon spokesperson said the current set-up offers “the right balance.”

What about the big mixed events where both the women and the men play best-of-three sets? 

Indian Wells has a finals Sunday on which both the women and the men play — guess who plays first? Cincinnati will hold the finals on the same day this year, and we’ll see who goes first. Miami, Madrid and Rome have the women play Saturday, the men Sunday. 

“I don’t really think that it’s just a question of money, but also respect,” Jabeur said. “It’s small details that make the difference.” 

It happens in a macro way, too. The WTA Tour Finals take place the week before the ATP Tour Finals. The Billie Jean King Cup wraps up before the Davis Cup, although there will be overlap from this year.

Next year, Great Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association will host a women’s WTA 500 at the Queen’s Club in London. It will begin immediately after the French Open, the week before the men take the stage at Queen’s, and in the build-up the focus has been not on the benefits of a women’s tournament at such a prestigious event, but whether or not the ATP is happy that the grass will be pristine enough for male feet after a week of tennis.

There will not be equal prize money.

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What’s the one thing you would change about tennis?

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Games, sets, and matches

Jessica Pegula, the world No 5 and a member of the WTA Player Council made it very clear at the French Open in 2022.

“I don’t want to play three out of five,” Pegula said. 

She’s hardly the only one. It’s a slog, with matches that can stretch beyond five hours, and then you have to do it all over again two days later. There is not a throng of women’s players clamoring for best-of-five tennis at the Grand Slams.

It’s still the third rail of equality in tennis. 

Best-of-five sets only exists at the Grand Slams, where women and men compete for the same prize money — and a lot of folks complain that it’s equal pay for less work every time it comes up. It’s a prime example of another uneven dynamic, where women have to account for every possible bad-faith accusation that could emerge before opening their mouths on the biggest issues in their sport.

Duration isn’t the only element of work. Best-of-three requires immediate competitiveness, with little time for recovery. It’s not Swiatek’s fault that she is so good at plowing through the competition, and it’s no player’s fault that the best players in the men’s game might drop two sets to lesser opponents and have to claw back three.

It’s also not any WTA player’s fault that tennis audiences sometimes dismiss the variety of styles in the women’s game as “boring” — though they’re probably talking without watching. Anyone who has watched a WTA match this year, especially between Swiatek, Sabalenka, Gauff, and Rybakina would have to agree with the Pole’s comments after her Madrid final against Sabalenka.

“Who’s gonna say now that women‘s tennis is boring?”

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Men’s grand-slam matches are 25% longer than in 1999. Does something need to change?

Stardom also fluctuates. When Wimbledon, and the French, U.S. and Australian Opens sell tickets, sponsorships and media rights, they mostly don’t sell separately for the men’s tournament and the women’s tournament. There were plenty of days and nights when Serena Williams was the featured match in New York and elsewhere, and a couple of guys were the undercard or the afterthought. In Rome this month, where men and women play best-of-three, the WTA semi-finals featured the top three players on tour and the best form player of 2024 in Danielle Collins, with the final again between world No 1 Swiatek and world No 2 Sabalenka.

The men’s semi-finalists had an average ranking of 19, with one of the finalists, Alexander Zverev, about to defend himself in a domestic abuse hearing while continuing to play. Some of that is to do with the caprices of injury and form — but they are intrinsic parts of tennis, and they don’t change the fact that the WTA Tour appears to be locking in to a generational rivalry while the ATP Tour is in relative flux.

If a similar dynamic emerges at Roland Garros, is the men’s event still qualitatively better because of two more sets?

Billie Jean King, the trailblazing Grand Slam champion and founding figurehead of the WTA Tour, is adamant: as long as there are different formats, there will be inequality.

Hang around with her even a little bit, and three phrases keep coming up.

“Same format.” “Equal content.” “Equal exposure.”

To King, if a women’s match only lasts 60 percent as long as a men’s match, then they will receive 60 percent of the television exposure as the men, and spend 60 percent of the time on the biggest courts in the biggest tournaments.

That math practically guarantees that women are less well-known and attract less money. There are exceptions — Williams, Maria Sharapova, Naomi Osaka, Emma Raducanu, Coco Gauff — but the numbers are hard to overcome. World No 1 Swiatek has recently bagged the huge sponsorships her status deserves, but it’s taken time.

GO DEEPER

Iga Swiatek’s 100 weeks as world No 1: The streak, the slams, the bagels

Tournament directors say having men and women play best-of-five is impossible from a scheduling perspective. Too many too-long matches. Too few courts. And the players don’t want it.

King and others have offered a solution — best-of-three for everyone the first week; best-of-five the second. There’s precedent — 50 years ago at the French Open, the men played best-of-three for the first two rounds. Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert won their first Grand Slam titles, and you might remember that they did pretty well after that. The sun also continued to rise in the east.

The knock-on effects of the current system on scheduling also virtually guarantee more conflict and inequality — sometimes in the name of equality.

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As night follows day

Tennis players of a certain age who spent time around private clubs remember times not very long ago when men got first dibs on high-demand slots. Elina Svitolina said that the men (regular players, not tour stars) still get the prime slots at the club near her home in Monte Carlo. Svitolina, top 20 in her sport, formerly a world No 3, had to practice early morning or at dusk.

Three years ago, the French Open started holding a night session with a featured singles match, which now starts at at 8:15 p.m. in the main stadium, Court Philippe Chatrier. The tournament markets it as the match of the day. The U.S. and Australian Open schedule two matches in their night sessions, until the late rounds.

During the first three years, Roland Garros organizers scheduled a total of four women’s matches at night. Amelie Mauresmo, the former women’s world No 1 and tournament director, initially justified the disparity by explaining that men’s tennis is more appealing.

She tried to walk that back but also explained that charging a premium for a session that might finish in an hour is problematic — a knock-on effect of those unequal formats that deprives top women of a primetime audience. Moving a doubles match onto Chatrier after Iga Swiatek blows through an opponent 6-0, 6-1 isn’t seen as viable.

Swiatek made it clear last year that she doesn’t care for playing at night.

“There are players who like the hype and the energy, and maybe the conditions, but for me it’s more comfortable to just have the normal day/night rhythm,” Swiatek said. “I think it’s more healthy for me to play day sessions.”

That was arguably a self-inflicted wound, as were Aryna Sabalenka’s recent comments about preferring men’s tennis. However, this also illustrates another unspoken dynamic: women have to be extra careful not to say anything denigrating about their sport, lest they get criticized for not supporting fellow players, even though a top men’s player saying something about their sport would likely not be considered an existential threat to its repute.

It’s also rare that male players speak up. Andy Murray’s corrections of journalists’ “first…” stats are an exception: the three-time Grand Slam champion has routinely reminded journalists of their forgetting about the Williams sisters, most notably in 2017 when a reporter claimed Sam Querrey was the first American to reach a major semi-final since 2009. Canadian Denis Shapovalov wrote that “I think some people might think of gender equality as mere political correctness” in an essay on the equal pay in the Players’ Tribune in 2023.

Furthermore, it’s well-documented that top men’s players have unspoken preferences, which they often communicate to tournaments, and which tournaments — unspokenly — try to accommodate or nudge around. (They do this some for top women, too). Rafael Nadal has said clay-court tennis should never take place at night, and it goes on.

The other scheduling inequality also happens at night. No-one, man or woman, wants to play the second late match at the U.S. or Australian Open, with a ridiculous start time.

The men argue that if women are getting equal pay then they should play the late match half the time. OK, but then a men’s match goes five sets in four hours and the women start at 11:30 pm in an empty stadium.

Sometimes scheduling benefits to men happen so fast no one really notices. The Madrid Open experimented with a new doubles format this year, cramming the men’s event mostly into the second half of the second week.

That meant men who weren’t playing the singles got an extra week off. A highly-ranked man who lost early could find a doubles partner, and with him an extra few days of free food, lodging and practice. Nice.

The women’s doubles? It started at the start. They didn’t have that option. Organizers didn’t purposefully set out to deprive them; it just happened, and they had to deal with it.

This attitude extends to matters of inequality in planning and infrastructure off-court, too; anxiety about change doesn’t just extend to the number of sets played or matches scheduled.

Wimbledon only relaxed its all-white dress code after concerns from players about menstruation last year, where the tournament previously required all clothing, including underwear, to be white. At the time, Magda Linette told The Athletic that she has “had a couple of situations at Wimbledon where I felt very uncomfortable,” and welcomed the change, but it had required strident protest at the previous year’s tournament to make it happen.

Top players have become increasingly open about discussing the impact of menstruation on form and performance, with numerous female players talking about PMS’ impact on their game — albeit while coding it as “girl things” in press conferences. China’s Zheng Qinwen saw cramps derail what would have been a famous victory against Iga Swiatek at the French Open in 2022, while Swiatek herself opened up about PMS contributing to her loss to Maria Sakkari of Greece at the same tournament in 2021. “PMS really hit me that day. I’m telling this for every young girl who doesn’t know what’s going on. Don’t worry, it’s normal. Everybody has it,” she said.

Women also suffer speculations about general injuries and “illness” that men never have to go through. Combined with the sport’s limited provisions for players that want to have children — there is no maternity pay, even though players that take time out can retain their previous ranking to enter 12 tournaments over a three-year period after giving birth — these changes and the increased visibility, through players like Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, Caroline Wozniacki, and Elina Svitolina, also reinforce that tennis’ women are playing in a structure built for men.

On the tour, it is ever thus.

GO DEEPER

Wimbledon are relaxing their all-white dress code to ease the stress of women’s periods

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(Down) the bottom line

Ultimately, the starkest measure comes in dollars, euros, pounds.

Women and men have received equal prize money at all of the Grand Slam tournaments since 2007. Amid some fanfare, last year the WTA Tour announced that the 500-level tournaments would follow suit, along with that 2027 plan for the 1000-level tournaments one rung below the Grand Slams. But not until 2033, in almost a decade. At the time of the deal, Paula Badosa said, “I don’t know why it’s not equal right now.” Tour officials said new sales and marketing efforts need time to produce more revenue.

The WTA requires top players to participate in every Masters 1000 tournament as part of that deal. World No 4 Elena Rybakina, and Swiatek too, have previously expressed disappointment at the way the WTA communicated these changes. Last year in Rome, Rybakina had to lift her title gone midnight after rain delays. Organizers refused to move the match to Sunday, because of the men’s final. Schedule, audience, money.

Tournament organizers have long complained that equal prize money is impossible when WTA media deals are worth about 20 percent of ATP equivalents. Consequently, the WTA contributes far less than the ATP, and the prize money reflects that. That’s how two tournaments in Auckland, New Zealand organized essentially by the same people have the women playing for $262,000 and the men for $660,000. 

Last year, male players shared $336million in prize money, including the Grand Slams. Women shared $170million.

Why are those media deals worth so much less? Women often receive second billing in mixed tournaments, play less desirable schedules and don’t get the same television coverage, because their matches are shorter. And then the players get blamed for not being able to bring in as much money. This is how it all coheres, into the ultimate self-fulfilling, blame-the-victim ouroboros that is seemingly impossible to slay.

Last year, Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, struck a deal with CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm, which bought 20 percent of a WTA commercial subsidiary for $150 million. The tour has launched a commercial ventures entity aimed at enhancing sales and marketing efforts and improve the visibility of tournaments, part of which is improving streaming and online showings of matches, which are currently limited in comparison to the ATP Tour.

“I would love to go to the hotel and open the TV and see a woman’s tennis match,” Jabeur said midway through the Madrid Open. “I haven’t seen once one tennis match of woman. For me, it’s really frustrating to see that.”

There are more improvements. After a series of disastrous decisions on venues, scheduling, and promotion which came to a nadir in Cancun last year, women will compete for about the same amount of prize money as the men at the season-ending Tour Finals — the WTA’s premier event and a knock-out showcase for the top eight players in the world — for the next three years.

They’ll just have to do so in Saudi Arabia, a country with a long history of human rights abuses, that has jailed women who have run afoul of the country’s leaders by pushing too hard for equality.

Welcome to the new dawn.

(Top photos: Hannah Peters; Julian Finney/Getty Images; Design: John Bradford)

Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the story behind the stories from the last week on court. This week, the coveted Masters 1000 in Rome ran its first week and the stories on court were matched by the drama off it. Novak Djokovic exited, struck by a water bottle, Rafael Nadal took the next step in his comeback, and the on-court spectacle was overtaken by some strange umpiring.

And is everybody injured now?

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Are all these injuries signal or noise?

Friday lunchtime in Rome and the Foro Italico briefly felt like an infirmary, as one medical bulletin followed another.

First, defending champion Elena Rybakina withdrew because of illness, before the first matches of the day on the Campo Centrale and Pietrangeli courts ended in retirements: Lorenzo Musetti (virus) on the former, Anna Blinkova (ankle) on the latter.

Later in the day, world No 7 Casper Ruud battled a back problem in his defeat to Miomir Kecmanovic, who had a similar injury and said afterwards that he took three kinds of pills to numb the pain.

The Italian Open had already seen two of the men’s favourites, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, pull out with fitness issues before it had begun. Defending champion Daniil Medvedev arrived carrying an issue in his upper leg. Elsewhere on Friday, Dominic Thiem announced he would retire later in the year because of his long-standing wrist problem.

So, does tennis have an issue with injuries?

It was a talking point throughout the first week in Rome and Danielle Collins, who benefited from Blinkova’s retirement, told The Athletic after the match that this kind of situation is an occupational hazard given tennis’s relentless schedule.

“It’s to be expected when we have this many tournaments back to back to back,” she said. “It’s a physical sport and when people are going far and playing lots of matches, injuries and illnesses will pop up.

“I’m not surprised. It’s a long season — everyone deals with injuries or illness during the season.”

A couple of days earlier, Medvedev played down the withdrawals: “Injuries, in general, are coincidence unless it’s the same injury for everyone.”

Grigor Dimitrov, the world No 10 and a relative veteran at 32, offered a different perspective: “We’ve seen a lot more retirements in the last two and a half years because the sport is a lot more demanding.”

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Can Kerber and Osaka crack the comeback (on clay?)

Naomi Osaka and Angelique Kerber are really good tennis players, and giving birth wasn’t going to change that.

That doesn’t mean coming back is easy. Tennis doesn’t protect player rankings during maternity leave, so women can get thrown to the wolves in the early rounds of tournaments and struggle to find wins when they need them most. Osaka and Kerber have been dealing with that these past months, showing flashes of their past Grand Slam-winning selves, but also periods of inconsistency that can spell doom in two-of-three-set tennis.

But in Rome, Kerber is back in another Masters 1000 round of 16, where she will have her work cut out against Iga Swiatek, the world No 1. Reaching the second week already counts as a victory for Kerber, who is only in month five of her comeback. With her best career results on grass and hard courts, she’s not a player any seed wants to face this summer.

Osaka’s coach, Wim Fissette set her the goal of returning to form for this year’s hard swing in North America, but Osaka is famously impatient and newly redoubtable on the red stuff. Rome has arguably been her best week, with wins over Marta Kostyuk, one of the best players this year, and Daria Kasatkina, maybe the world’s smartest player. Next up was Australian Open finalist Zheng Qinwen, who is 21 years old and relished the match-up, taking out an errant Osaka in straight sets.

That defeat doesn’t discredit Osaka’s commitment to improving on a surface she normally doesn’t relish at all. Osaka lost early in Madrid and went to Mallorca to train before Rome. “I watched some videos,” she said. “I watched Rafa. I watched Alcaraz. I watched Rublev, which is very inspiring. He’s smacking the ball and I thought, ‘I don’t want to have regrets when I leave the court’. In Madrid, I did have regrets of not swinging fully.”

No regrets? Sounds good.

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Out in the tramlines: Should umpires be part of the show?

The rise of electronic line calling (ELC) means that umpires are increasingly peripheral figures in tennis.

Clay is slightly different, with tournaments, including the Italian Open, still relying on them popping off their chairs to inspect ball marks.

During a tight final set between British world No 67 Dan Evans and home favourite Fabio Fognini on Thursday night, Fognini scooped a forehand drive volley short and wide — too wide. The line judge responsible for the singles sideline initially put out an arm to stipulate it was out; the Hawk-Eye evidence indicated it was out; umpire Mohamed Lahyani insisted it was not.

“You couldn’t show me the mark, the ball didn’t hit the f*****g line,” as Evans put it.

Lahyani insisted during the argument that the line judge had called the ball in, which appeared not to be the case. The incident came a year after Evans’ compatriot Andy Murray got in a similar argument with Lahyani — against the same opponent and at the same tournament.

The back-and-forth continued, and Evans was given a code violation warning for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Some would argue this wasn’t entirely coincidental. Lahyani is happy to get involved in matches — sometimes too much, like six years ago when he gave Nick Kyrgios a mid-match pep talk, subsequently earning a suspension from the ATP. In Rome, there was the surreal sight of Lahyani getting mobbed by spectators on the grounds of the Foro Italico. Officials are generally not revered in this way, and at last year’s tournament, Djokovic took the umpire to task for it, asking him “what is the drama” and “are you acting here” during a row over calling the score.

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Why did so many people think someone threw a bottle at Djokovic?

The widespread assumption on Friday night that Djokovic had been deliberately rather than accidentally struck by a water bottle broadly came about for a couple of reasons.

The first was that the original footage made it look that way.

The second, and more revealing, reason is that someone hating Djokovic enough to lob a bottle at him didn’t seem especially far-fetched. And maybe those preconceptions informed why so many assumed it was deliberate from the jump — not just his most dedicated fans, but tennis social media aggregators, figureheads, and Boris Becker.

Djokovic’s divisiveness is well-documented, with an army of supporters and his litany of staggering achievements not belying a huge number of detractors. Without re-litigating all that here, the hostility originally stemmed from the rivalry he enjoyed with the largely beloved Nadal and Roger Federer.

It has intensified over the last few years.

He has arguably surpassed both in terms of achievement with comparatively little fanfare; his decision not to get the Covid-19 vaccine, which he always stressed was a personal choice, has invited opprobrium and unwittingly made him a poster boy for groups who believe that choice is a victory against the establishment.

There have been other controversies — at the Australian Open last year, his father was pictured with Vladimir Putin supporters; in the first week of last year’s French Open, he wrote “Kosovo is the (heart symbol) of Serbia” on a television camera in response to violent clashes in Kosovo, putting himself once more in the middle of a battle that has plagued the Balkans for nearly 1,000 years and drawing accusations of aligning himself with fascism and philosophies that led to ethnic cleansing.

Djokovic said both were misinterpreted.

Thankfully Djokovic wasn’t attacked on Friday and, by the following day, he was making light of the incident, arriving at the Foro Italico wearing a bike helmet before his defeat to Alejandro Tabilo.

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No-shot of the week

Club players of the world: does this look familiar?

Left on purpose, @dThiagoMonteiro 😉#IBI24 pic.twitter.com/dEzRP3Mk8N

— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) May 8, 2024

Shot of the week

Club players of the world: does this look familiar?

Oh no he didn’t… 😱@dThiagoMonteiro with one of the shots of the week in Rome!#IBI24 pic.twitter.com/4WB864fuZS

— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) May 10, 2024

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Recommended reading:

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📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP: 

📍Rome, Italian Open (1000) second week, ft. Stefanos Tstitsipas, Alejandro Tabilo, Thiago Monteiro, Grigor Dimitrov
📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA:

📍Rome, Italian Open (1000) second week, ft. Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments as the tours continue.

(Top photos: Mike Hewitt; Alex Pantling; Dan Isitene/Getty Images)

“I wanted to be a little bit different from anyone else,” Ben Shelton said recently in Madrid.

He was actually talking about his decision last year to sign a major deal with the small-but-growing Swiss shoe and apparel manufacturer On, rather than pursuing a certain American behemoth with a famous swoosh. (More on that in a bit.) The Floridian was in the early days of a three-month sojourn in Europe that will last as long as he does at Wimbledon, which ends in mid-July.

But Shelton, who is 21, could have been talking about anything to do with his budding tennis career, which has been the opposite of cookie-cutter. 

Football (the American kind), in addition to tennis, until middle school? Different.

Regular high school rather than a tennis academy? Different.

Zero junior Grand Slam appearances? Different.

Major doses of collegiate exuberance: the “Yeah!” after big and small shots, the since-retired, hang-up-the-phone exclamation point on his wins? Different. 

And now that the clay swing is here, Shelton is once more cutting against the grain, moving on to Rome and the Italian Open as he treats a third-round loss in Spain last week as just another step in tackling something that has beguiled most American men for a good long while. 

That would be that red clay.

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The easy brutality of Shelton’s tennis, which carried him to the semi-finals of the U.S. Open last year, can be deceiving.

He can blast his serve at 150mph (241kph) and rocket forehands like few others, cutting points short at a breath or stealing momentum in a rally.

At first glance, that gives him the sort of stereotypical, big American game that won’t easily translate to the dirt. Other notable Yanks with those qualities have basically held their noses and endured these months of attritional-style tennis, counting the days until the grass and hard courts of summer. 

Well, that’s not how Shelton rolls.

He spent the two weeks leading up to his departure for Spain at a hardcore clay-court boot camp. “I worked on the things that I needed to: on the court, off the court, strength, fitness, moving,” he said. “I just really honed in.”

Rather than enduring the soft stuff, Shelton is embracing it. This is something other American men have traditionally avoided, including his own father and coach, Bryan, a touring pro in the 1980s and 1990s. He often swerved red clay other than the French Open, and the odd other tournament, for most of his career.

“I realized too late that my game was pretty well-suited to it,” he said after a practice session with his son last week. “I had this big kick-serve. I could push guys back. It opened up the court.” He shook his head, still annoyed with his younger self, 30 years on.

His kid isn’t letting such assumptions take root. He’s taking a different approach. 

Late last year, Shelton asked Gabriel Echevarria, a veteran trainer, to join his team full-time as a strength and conditioning coach. It was another off-beat but logical move for someone who is as strong as a lumberjack and can run like a deer but remains prone to being wrong-footed or taken off-balance.

Echevarria, who spent the past dozen years working for the U.S. Tennis Association and Tennis Australia, is Argentinian. He has a reputation for possessing a special knowledge of what it takes to attain proper movement and balance in tennis — especially on clay, the most common tennis surface in Argentina.

The ideal candidate to lead a crash course.

The most common mistake for clay-court newbies, Echevarria said, is sliding after the shot, which wastes time, rather than sliding into the shot. Certain shots require fewer steps, or smaller ones, or an extra step. 

“If we learn the skill, then we can develop the skill, but the first thing is to learn the proper way,” Echevarria explains. “Once you learn the proper way, the model pattern, then we can develop that skill.”

Shelton perceives Echevarria as a kind of clay whisperer, who has helped him to understand its idiosyncrasies. “The clay court is just a little bit different than the hard court,” Shelton says. “You can’t do the same things.”

So, before each day of training, not in Monte Carlo or Barcelona where tournaments were happening but back home in Florida, Echevarria and Shelton’s father would talk about what movement to focus on. Sometimes, it was learning how to run diagonally, which happens often on clay because of all the drop shots and slices. Other times, it was how to recover and shift from one shot to the next.

Then, Shelton would head onto the court to try out what he had just learned for two or three hours. After a break and some lunch, afternoons consisted of more time on the court if Bryan felt it was necessary, and/or up to 90 minutes in the gym. It was gruelling, and exposed Shelton to the need to attune himself to what he found under his feet.

“Every clay court is just a little bit different,” he says.

“The bounces are unpredictable, so you can’t always rely on short-hopping a ball — taking a ball early. You can get too close to the bounce or set your feet too early and the bounce can be unpredictable and go in a direction that you don’t think it’s gonna go,” he explains.

This is particularly true in Madrid, where the altitude (2,000ft/650m above sea level) adds speed to the flight of the ball, creating the kind of conditions that left Daniil Medvedev gesturing at his coaching team with impotent rage, frustrated by being in the right place at the wrong time, or maybe the other way around. Rome, softer, slower, at sea level, carries its own quirks.

Shelton? He isn’t bothered. He’s thoughtful, and he’s here for it.

“You have a little bit more time to play because, in most places, the clay is a little bit slower than hard courts, but actually here in Madrid, it’s really fast,” he said.

“But for the most part, the game slows down a bit. So you have more time, which I really like. But at the same time, you gotta learn how to use that time and learn how to defend against guys who also have more time.”

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These are the words of someone determined not to repeat their father’s sins, someone who wants to be a little different than what a lot of the world might expect of a player with his unique brand of raw power and athleticism.

It was not so different from the choice he made a little more than a year ago to roll the dice a bit in that deal with On. 

He had attended college at the University of Florida, a quintessential Nike school. So many of the biggest figures in American tennis and American sports have become synonymous with the swoosh over the years: John McEnroe, Andre Agassi, Michael Jordan Tiger Woods, LeBron James, and on and on. 

“I didn’t want to be one of 50 Nike guys,” Shelton says. “Obviously it was also a big draw with On having probably the biggest icon in the history of tennis — you know, other than, like, Serena (Williams).” Shelton is referencing Roger Federer, who acquired a significant stake in On five years ago, with the company building and launching a debut tennis apparel collection on the back of his involvement, along with that of Shelton and the women’s world No 1 Iga Swiatek.

Here was Shelton, a dude, a male tennis star no less, kind of, sort of, putting Federer a slot behind Serena Williams in the sport’s pecking order, or at least putting them on the same plane. That doesn’t happen too often.

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On an unseasonably chilly Saturday evening in Madrid two weeks ago, Shelton took the court for his opening match against Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic.

Machac, who is 23, has been tearing through some of the best players in the world this season. He plays a silky, deceptively powerful, all-court game and, like most central European players, largely grew up on clay. 

He may be ranked 35 spots below Shelton, who is now world No. 14, but he is the sort of player who has proven to be a nightmare for Americans on clay practically forever.

Shelton promptly tore through Machac, 6-0, 6-2. 

He used his power to push the Czech far behind the baseline, then moved forward himself, sending volleys and drop shots into the open court. He took advantage of that little extra time clay gives — “I love time on the ball,” he says — and jumped all over Machac’s second serve, taking it early, claiming the momentum.

Two days later, Shelton was a point away from a likely cruise to a straight-set win over Alexander Bublik of Kazakhstan. He struggled to handle a couple of Bublik’s notoriously relentless drop shots, scrambling uncomfortably, and that allowed Bublik the crack of light he needed to climb back into the match. The Kazakh would win in three sets, 3-6, 7-6(2), 6-4.

This was the live version of the clay tutorial Shelton is seeking from Echevarria. Regardless of the defeat, it was a 180-degree turnaround from when he landed in Europe a year ago for his first red-clay season. “Last year, I just had no idea what to expect,” he said.

That’s not his fault. There just isn’t a lot of red clay in America, where players largely learn the game on hard courts.

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Growing up in Florida, Shelton played some on green clay, which is harder to move on and produces far less predictable bounces than the red variety. Sloane Stephens, another Floridian and the 2018 French Open runner-up, calls red clay “the real stuff”. Still, Shelton barely hit a ball on clay after he turned 16 and his focus shifted to college tennis, which is a hard-court affair.

His match today, Friday May 10, in Rome against Pavel Kotov will be just his 16th professional contest on clay, and that includes four wins in the U.S. Clay Court Championships in Houston early last month. He won that tournament and, while any ATP Tour title is nothing to sneeze at, Shelton knew he remained well short of being ready to contend at Roland Garros. So, the boot camp. The learning. The discomfort, the embrace of something not quite what he expected. Being, in a word, different.

Some good tennis players become great by becoming a higher quality version of the player they were when they first broke into the tour. Others go from good to great by opening their mind to new skills.

What’s Shelton? 

“He’s like a sponge,” Echevarria says.

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Shelton emerged from that boot camp believing he could thrive on clay, maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually.

Clay forces him to become the kind of player he wants to be — a threat on every surface not simply because his serve is a game-altering cruise missile, but because he can move the ball around the court with spin and height over the net, and come into the net and volley into an open court and grind when the moment requires it.

“Americans haven’t had the best success in the clay-court season or at Roland Garros, but it’d be really cool to change that narrative,” he says.

He also doesn’t think he has a choice. Clay season lasts two months. It’s not the four-week sprint grass season is. There are simply too many rankings points up for grabs on clay courts for someone with designs on reaching the top of the game to concede anything.

Americans aren’t generally known for their patience. They like stuff now — immediate gratification. Focusing on process over results doesn’t always come naturally. But once more, Shelton is a little different in that area, with some nudging from Echevarria and his father.

He is approaching this clay swing as he did the boot camp, as an opportunity to learn, to collect information, to analyze how he has improved, to see if he can execute all those step patterns and all that sliding on the most famous crushed red brick in the world. 

If winning happens, great. If not? Fine. Just like clay calls for, Team Shelton is playing a long game. 

“We don’t get frustrated,” Echevarria says. “We don’t worry about it because we know that, guess what? The French Open is going to be played on clay next year. It’s going to be played on clay for 100 years.”

(Top photos: L-R: On; Centre: ATP Tour; design: Dan Goldfarb)

Imagine having done the same thing for something like 30 years, being better at it than just about anyone who has ever lived, and then one day, it’s all completely new. 

And so it is for Rafael Nadal in this through-the-looking-glass spring. For years, no place felt more like home than a red clay court. He could lose matches sometimes. Everyone does. But he almost never played poorly.

He could leave his guts on the court with an effort that would leave most of the population unable to walk for weeks. Then he would wake up in the morning and, within a few hours, be able to start preparing to do it all over again. And then, sometimes, he really would do it all over again.

Those days are done, perhaps never to return. Nearly a year and a half since a debilitating hip injury, nearly a year since major surgery to try to fix it, nearly two years since he was a mainstay of the professional tour, each match, each day, has become an experiment and a riddle for Nadal. 

How much can he push? How long can he go? How does his body feel when he opens his eyes for the first time each morning, when he rolls out of bed, when he leans over to pick up his 18-month-old son, Rafa, when he walks onto the court for a warm-up session and strokes the ball for the first time? 

The latest test came Tuesday night against Jiri Lehecka, the talented young Czech with the limber physique and easy power that Nadal, always the brutalist, never had. But nothing about the match really had anything to do with the contrasts he and Nadal presented, or really even the score. 

This was all about the latest of Nadal’s experiments.

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A little more than 24 hours before he and Lehecka took the court, Nadal had gone three sets and more than three hours against Pedro Cachin of Argentina. In both matches, the most important numbers on the scoreboard were counting the elapsed time. How many rolling backhands and bullwhip forehands could Nadal endure, or even want to endure, with his lodestar, the French Open, starting in 26 days.

The first set went 57 minutes, with Lehecka surviving three tight service holds and capitalizing on a cluster of Nadal errors in the 11th game to break, before serving out the set. Lehecka then broke Nadal’s serve in the first game of the second set. Nadal’s balls started to fly long and into the net without it bothering him all that much, and it was hard not to think of how he had described his game plan moving forward the night before, after his three-hour fist-fight with Cachin. 

“Trying without doing crazy things, but trying,” he said, which is what Lehecka’s 7-5, 6-4 win that lasted a little over two hours ultimately looked like.

A third set and another hour might have qualified as a crazy thing under the circumstances.

Cachin, a 29-year-old journeyman who knows his way around a clay court, had given Nadal as much as he could handle and more than anyone had expected, digging in for long fights for points, forcing him to scramble across the baseline. A few years ago, this would have been another day of certainty for Nadal: the clay, the winning, the looking ahead to the next match knowing — within a very small margin — what version of himself would take the court. 

Instead, he walked the corridors of the Caja Magica Monday night, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head, and telling everyone who would listen that he had no idea what the future held. 

“I never recovered too bad after tough matches, I think even at 36 years old or 35,” said Nadal, who is now nearly 38. “Today is a completely different story. It’s not only about injuries. First thing is injuries. Second thing is about… I never spent almost two years without playing tennis tournaments.”

Everyone knows what this is all about for Nadal — figuring out whether it’s going to be worth his while to put his name in the draw at the French Open, the tournament he has won 14 times, where his record at Roland Garros is a ridiculous 112-3. He’s not going to go merely for an ovation and a bouquet, or to gaze at the nine-foot statue of him outside Court Philippe Chatrier.

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He knows his tennis is there, but he will only go if he believes his body will be there, too. This is best-of-five-set tennis, on clay, and matches are affairs that generally last close to three hours, maybe longer. His serve in its current iteration, slowed by injuries to his midsection, isn’t allowing him to grab many quick and easy points. Nearly everything he gets, he has to earn the hard way. Late in the second set on Tuesday night, 40 per cent of Lehecka’s serves had gone unreturned, allowing him to speed through holds of serve already rendered tricky by the booms of “Rafa, Rafa, Rafa” about his ears every time he stood up to the line. Asked about how he dealt with them, the Czech world No 31 could only puff out his cheeks and say, “I don’t know.”

Nadal’s figure was six per cent.

He will have a day off between matches at the French Open, unlike the 24-hour turnaround from Cachin to Lehecka, but still, the past days in Madrid have brought his first experience in what feels like forever of the grind-recover-grind routine the sport demands. 

Ten days ago in Barcelona, he couldn’t do it, winning a match then essentially folding after losing the first set of a second. Had he pushed for more in that moment, he might have been back where he was in January, in a tuneup tournament in Brisbane ahead of the Australian Open. There, in his third match, he pushed too soon. He went to sleep with a tweak. In the morning, an MRI revealed it was a tear. Three months of recovery and many more moments of doubt ensued.

Maybe this was it? He could swing a racket, but anything close to trying to replicate the intensity of top-level competition was out of the question. Same with an intense three-hour training session. He just wasn’t strong enough. 

Madrid has been different. His strength is back, but it’s not chartable: he still doesn’t have any idea what will happen from one day to the next. 

“It’s unpredictable, that’s it, and you need to accept the unpredictable things today,” he said earlier this week. “I need to accept that.”

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In a sense, Nadal has been preparing for this moment for more than 20 years, ever since doctors detected a congenital defect in his foot that nearly derailed his career before it ever got started. He had to accept then an extremely uncertain future. Anything that followed was a kind of gift. 

The experience begat ‘Zen-Rafa,’ the player who years ago compared an opponent’s aces to the rain, something he had no control over and simply accepted. Now he was back where it all started and not just because he said Madrid is where he felt for the first time, back in 2003, that he could compete at the highest level.

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Sure, Nadal would have preferred to win once again in this packed metal bandbox in front of 12,000 people who love him as they love little else. He is as big a sports hero as this country has ever produced, which Raul Gonzalez Blanco, the legendary Real Madrid and Spain striker, knows well. He was there watching against Cachin.

But Nadal knew he had already won by being able to answer the bell against Lehecka, something he could only hope he would be able to do when he closed his eyes the night before. Picking up some easy points on his serve marked another win. Those classic, loop-one-ball-then-crush-the-next-one combinations, the quick bends for the short-hop winners, the perfect slice volley when he followed his serve into the net midway through the second set — win, win, win. 

The moment when he sprinted to the baseline from his chair, one game from defeat, and 12,000 people stood and roared, and the noise rattled all around the metal building — that may have been the biggest win of all. They did it again on match point, then chanted his name when he sprayed a final backhand wide on what is likely his final match in the city.

He described the night as “very positive in many senses, not only sporting but also emotionally.”

“It’s been a gift to spend 21 years here,” Nadal told the crowd during a celebration on the court after the match. “The emotions, of playing in Madrid, playing on this court, are going to stay with me forever.”

Still, as much as Nadal has accepted the uncertainty of the future and soaking up the love, he is also making plans. He is playing himself into form now, trying to pass tests with every match so he can dream of magic, not just at the French Open but after, too. 

The Olympic Games are at Roland Garros. He wants to at least play doubles there with Carlos Alcaraz, who is well on his way to taking over from Nadal in the Spanish tennis imagination. Last week he committed to play the Laver Cup, the Team Europe vs Team World competition that his friend and rival Roger Federer created. That’s in September. 

Madrid brought four matches in six days. Assuming his body comes through all this, he will head to Rome for the Italian Open next week for another series of tests. Then comes the decision about the French Open.

That’s both imminent and a ways away. Nadal, who, in all his greatness has still somehow always managed to come off as a normalish guy, is day to day, as the saying goes — just as we all are.

(Top photo: Manuel Queimadelos/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)

Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the story behind the stories from the last week on court.

This week, the coveted Masters 1000 in Madrid ran its first week and the stories on court were matched by the drama off it, as the Grand Slams and tennis tours continue their beauty pageant for the future of the sport.

If you’d like more tennis coverage, please click here.

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Can ‘assurances’ on player safety in Saudi Arabia ever be enough?

Daria Kasatkina, the highest ranked openly gay player in women’s tennis, was asked Sunday how she felt about the WTA opting to hold its Tour Finals for the next three years in Saudi Arabia, a country, where homosexuality is a crime that can be punished by death.

Only the top eight players qualify for the Tour Finals. Kasatkina is currently world No 11.

“Look, if I qualify, it means that I’m top eight in the world,” Kasatkina said after advancing to the round of 16 in Madrid. “It’s great news for me.”

Then she took a deep breath. “We see that the Saudis, now they are very into the sport. They want to develop the sport, and as long as it gives the opportunity to the people there and the young kids and the women, too, you know, we see that sport  and specifically tennis, it’s actually so close so that they can watch it. They can play, they can participate in this, I think it’s great.”

Asked how she thinks the environment would be for gay players and those in same sex relationships as she is, and whether she has received assurances about being able to perhaps, share a room with a partner, Ksatkina once more paused pensively.“I’ve been given assurances that I’m going to be fine,” she said.

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Does it matter if Aryna Sabalenka wants to watch men’s tennis?

Sabalenka caused a bit of a stir last week when she told a Spanish media outlet that she doesn’t watch much women’s tennis and prefers the men’s game, saying it was more interesting. That wasn’t the kind of buzz the women’s tour is looking for from its top players.

Sabalenka clarified those comments after winning her first match in Madrid, explaining that sitting down to watch her opponents isn’t how she prefers to spend her free time.

“I play against all of them, and I just want to change the picture, and because I watch lots of women’s tennis before I go to the match, I watch my opponents, I watch lots of women’s tennis,” she said. “It’s not like I don’t like it or I try to offend what I do. I was trying to say that because I’m playing there and it’s too much for me, I’m trying to watch men’s tennis. It’s more fun than watching probably my future opponents in the tournament.”

A perfectly understandable explanation. Tennis, and watching it, is work for the top players in the world, men and women. Baseball players don’t watch much baseball in their free time.

(Full disclosure, this can be true for tennis writers, as well.)

It’s a sensitive topic around the tour, especially because it wasn’t long ago that Amelie Mauresmo, the French Open tournament director and a former world No 1, described men’s tennis as more appealing to justify her decision to let men dominate the tournament’s nightly featured match.

Women have enough of a problem with men degrading their sport. Fairly or unfairly — probably the latter — that forces them to be extra careful when talking about their favorite versions of the sport. No one gets on Daniil Medvedev or any other male player when they fess up to not watching their sport unless they are in the middle of a tournament.

GO DEEPER

Listening to women: The slow rise of female tennis coaches

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Has an arm injury actually helped Carlos Alcaraz?

Few things worry the tennis world more than the health and wellbeing of Carlos Alcaraz. His magical play and dynamic style have captivated tennis fans and the rest of the sports-consuming public. He is one of those players who comes along not so often and transcends the game, providing an opportunity for tennis to break through the morass.

He also gets hurt a lot, and has missed some medium-sized chunks of his early seasons as a professional that have cost him a chance to play in important tournaments — the ATP Tour Finals in 2022 and the Australian Open in 2023 top that list.

GO DEEPER

Carlos Alcaraz is making magic again. Watch out.

So it was a little alarming when Alcaraz pulled out of Monte Carlo and Barcelona this month with an injury to his forearm. Competing in Madrid was touch-and-go until his final practice the day before his first match, which he played wearing a sleeve. His performance, a near-flawless 6-2, 6-1 win over Alexander Shevchenko of Kazakhstan, eased a lot of worries, but it also showcased another side of Alcaraz, who said he never went for broke on his cannon forehand to protect his arm.

“I hit it softer than I used to, but it helped me stay relaxed,” he said. “I think more.”

The data (below) shows that Alcaraz is hitting it softer (a three-mile-per-hour difference might not seem like much, but over 78 feet, it’s a lot) and with “less quality,” but he’s still winning.

Far be it for anyone to criticize the play of a two-time Grand Slam champion at 20 years old, but if there has been a weak spot for Alcaraz, it’s his tendency to sometimes play shots rather than points — especially when under pressure — and put together a highlight reel rather than simply win by playing solid, unspectacular tennis. If there is a silver lining to this latest injury, it could be that it forces Alcaraz to become a more restrained but more effective player, still with plenty of highlights to boot.

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Two bagels for you Coco, you go Coco!

Coco Gauff has done many impressive things in her tennis career, but the so-called ‘double-bagels’ are generally not her thing. She’s come close before, most recently last year in the WTA Finals against a hobbled Ons Jabeur. With Gauff, though, there’s usually a time in every match when the forehand gets wobbly or the serve goes on the skids.

Then came Madrid, and an opening-round match against Arantxa Rus of the Netherlands. Fifty-one minutes and a 51-18 point differential later, and Gauff had her first double-bagel. In her second match, against Dayana Yastremska, Gauff sprinted to a 4-0 lead and looked like she might get three in a row, but settled for a 6-4, 6-1. Breadsticks are good fuel, too.

Gauff is as good an athlete as there is in the game and can play all night if she needs to, but every player likes to be as clinical as she can be wherever possible. If Gauff can figure out how to do that, especially in the early rounds of tournaments, the rest of the field better watch out.

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Is the Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup crossover a good idea?

Legend of the sport Billie Jean King has long wanted a “Tennis World Cup” — and now she’s got it… sort of.

The International Tennis Federation (ITF) this week announced changes to the schedule and format of the annual event, creating a week of cross-over between the BJK Cup and the men’s equivalent, the Davis Cup, with the second semi-final and final of the women’s tournament overlapping the first two days of the men’s tournament in late November this year.

The women’s tournament has also moved to emulate the knock-out structure of its counterpart, replacing a round-robin finals with a straight shoot-out between eight of the final twelve teams. The four seeded nations — who, on current form, would be the Czech Republic and Australia, alongside 2023 winners and runners-up Canada and Italy — will receive a bye straight to the quarter-finals.

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Rune and Navone have Madrid on strings

If Medvedev’s destiny is in his strings, then Holger Rune’s might be missing a weave.

During his unnecessarily up-and-down victory over rising Argentinian Mariano Navone, he came over to the umpire at 5-3 in his favor (although, a few minutes previously, it was 5-1).

“The tournament is trying to cheat me,” he said. “They missed a string on my racket.” He then pushed away a camera before repeating his complaint. It looked more like a cross-string had been mis-weaved, rather than missing an entire line.

Rune had been 5-6, 15-30 down on Navone’s serve in the second set, on the verge of exiting the tournament, before Navone tightened up to hit two yomping double faults and a backhand error that barely landed in the tramlines to give up a tiebreak. Rune surged away with it, and the next six games to go 5-1, but the racket incident destabilised him completely and he ended up needing five match points before prevailing 6-4 in a final service game that swung like a pendulum.

Stringing Navone along, perhaps.

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Shots (fired) of the week

Alexander Bublik will do Alexander Bublik things whenever he wants. Roberto Carballes Baena isn’t a fan.

Lo que hace aquí Carballes Baena 🇪🇸 es para que le metan una buena sanción y no pueda pisar un torneo un buen tiempo.

Se pica porque Bublik hace el tonto ( lo hace siempre ) y a continuación busca darle un pelotazo con su saque dos veces seguidas.

Vergonzoso es poco pic.twitter.com/B7VAFtMekW

— Miguel_cmm (@Miguelcmm1) April 28, 2024

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📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP: 

📍Madrid, Mutua Madrid Open (1000) second week, ft. Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Rafael Nadal, Daniil Medvedev.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; US: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

🎾 WTA:

📍Madrid, Mutua Madrid Open (1000) second week, ft. Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; US: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments as the tours continue.

(Top photos: Clive Brunskill/Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the story behind the stories from the last week on court.

This week, the European clay swing kicked off in earnest across the ATP and WTA tours, with tournaments in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Romania. The four best women’s players faced off in Stuttgart, Barcelona witnessed the return of Rafael Nadal, and we saw a serve from zero gravity.

If you’d like more tennis coverage, please click here.

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Are the WTA and ATP tours swapping their metas?

For the past year, there’s been some chatter about a ‘Big Four’ forming in women’s tennis. It was a ‘Big Three’, comprised of Iga Swiatek, Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka, but then Coco Gauff won the U.S. Open and became a seriously consistent presence in the business end of tournaments, including the semi-finals of the Australian Open. She also climbed to No 3 in the rankings. At the same time, the rapid emergence of Carlos Alcaraz, succeeded by the slower burn of Jannik Sinner, Daniil Medvedev being Daniil Medvedev, and the elastic continuity of Novak Djokovic forged new rivalries on the ATP tour.

The last few months have thrown a wrench into that thinking. Despite being without a Grand Slam title since last year’s French Open, Swiatek continues to show every sign of being a dominant world No 1 for a good while. The other three haven’t delivered the kind of consistency that would really justify using a name that has its roots in the Roger Federer/Djokovic/Nadal/Andy Murray dominance of the 2010s.

A decade on, it is easy to forget how often those names landed in the last weekends of the biggest events. Consider 2012: of the 16 semi-final spots in that year’s four Grand Slam tournaments, Murray, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic accounted for 12 of them. Murray, Djokovic and Federer also took three of the semi-final spots at the London Olympics that year.

In Stuttgart last week, a rare mid-level tournament to attract the top four women, it looked like they might pull off a semi-final sweep. But then Marketa Vondrousova beat Sabalenka, and Gauff lost to Marta Kostyuk, with Elena Rybakina winning the tournament.

Next up, Madrid. Maybe the quartet will be the last four standing this time.

GO DEEPER

Tennis’ top women say the sport is broken. This is why

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What’s behind Andrey Rublev’s eight-set slump?

Good tennis players can see their form nosedive. Right now, it’s Rublev’s turn.

Rublev was world No 5 at the start of the year. He played to his seeding at the Australian Open, but he has been in a bad way since he was defaulted in the final games of a semi-final match in Dubai against Alexander Bublik in February.

Rublev angrily protested a call to a line judge. Another line judge claimed the Russian had used profanity in his native language.

He didn’t.

The tournament officials refused to review tapes before they defaulted Rublev and he was stripped of his ranking points and prize money earned.

The video went viral, and the ATP eventually restored his rankings points and the money he had earned — but the damage had been done. Rublev has won just one match since then, and he has lost to players ranked far lower than he is, including world No 44 Alexei Popyrin and last week, world No 87 Brandon Nakashima, which saw Rublev destroy his racket after losing match point.

The encounters have not been very close either. Rublev has apparently been healthy, but he’s just not playing very well, having dropped eight sets out of 10 since the default in a string of four consecutive defeats.

These stats aren’t awesome, but they aren’t exactly on a decline as steep as his match results. However, take a look at something else…

‘Dominance ratio’ is calculated by dividing the percentage of return points won by the percentage of service points lost. The last time Rublev’s dominance ratio was this low was in 2015, when his ranking high for the year was No 185 in the world and his ranking low was No 438.

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Coco Gauff does what Coco Gauff does… for how long?

Gauff gets a ton of accolades for her grit, her competitiveness, her ability to gut out tight matches, especially across three sets.

The American may have all those qualities, but she can also do math.

Gauff has played 25 matches, winning 19 and losing six. Of those 25 matches, eight have gone the distance, and of those eight, she has lost four.

That’s two losses in 17 two-set matches, and four losses in eight three-set matches.

What does all this mean?

Sure, her coach Brad Gilbert is the greatest espouser of winning ugly, but it has to include the “winning” part. Gauff pretty much always shows up, and it’s worth remembering that of those two straight-set defeats, one was against Sabalenka in the Australian Open semi-final.

She could still do with being a bit more clinical. As thrilling as it is to watch Gauff fight, as wild as it is to watch her win matches when she is far from her best, slim margins eventually catch up with players. That’s what happened in Stuttgart against Kostyuk, a player Gauff beat in three sets in Australia but who returned the favour in Germany.

It’s a microcosm of the coin flip that her three-setters have become.

GO DEEPER

Listening to women: The slow rise of female tennis coaches

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Stefanos Tsitsipas and Casper Ruud peak — but at the right time?

Tsitsipas and Ruud are two of the best clay court players in the world. Ruud has made the finals of the last two French Opens. Tsitsipas made the one before that. Unfortunately, their opponents in those finals, Nadal and Djokovic, have won a combined 46 Grand Slam titles, 17 of them at Roland Garros.

Still, Tsitispas and Ruud have earned the right to build their clay seasons to peak at the French Open, because both should be alive deep in the tournament and, depending on how the draw breaks, they might have a shot at winning it too.

The way things are going, they might not have any fuel left in their tanks.

For a second consecutive week, Ruud and Tsitispas met in the finals of a tournament, this time in Barcelona, where Ruud avenged his loss to the Greek in Monte Carlo. It was Ruud’s third event of the clay-court season and Tsitispas’s second, with Madrid and Rome — both competitions just under the level of a Grand Slam — taking up the next four weeks of the calendar before Roland Garros starts. That’s a lot of tennis, even for players in their mid-twenties, such as Ruud and Tsitispas.

Yes, this is the time of year when clay-court standouts try to pile up rankings points and prize money, but is it too much? Djokovic certainly thinks so, at least for him. A master of conserving energy and peaking at the biggest events, Djokovic played Monte Carlo, losing to Ruud in the semis, but he took last week off and has pulled out of Madrid too. He will likely play Rome, then head to Paris — fuel reserves on high.

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Kick it, real good

It is a truth universally acknowledged — at least by readers of beloved British children’s author Michael Rosen — that if you can’t go over it or under it, you’ve got to go through it.

Brazil’s raw but rising star Joao Fonseca does not acknowledge this truth.

How high does this go?! 😳

Joao Fonseca’s kick serve bounces OVER Sonego 🚀#TiriacOpen pic.twitter.com/t7X7OOI3CC

— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) April 16, 2024

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🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Casper Ruud def. Stefanos Tsitsipas 7-5, 6-3 to win the Banc Sabadell Open (500) in Barcelona. It is Ruud’s first ATP title above 250 level.
🏆 Jan-Lennard Struff def. Taylor Fritz 7-5, 6-3 to win the BMW Open (250) in Munich. It is Struff’s first ATP title.
🏆 Marton Fucsovics def. Mariano Navone 6-4, 7-5 to win the Tiriac Open (250) in Bucharest. It is Fucsovics’ second ATP title.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Elena Rybakina def. Marta Kostyuk 6-3, 6-3 to win the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix (500) in Stuttgart, Germany. It is Rybakina’s third title of 2024.
🏆 Sloane Stephens def. Magda Linette 6-1, 2-6, 6-2 to win the Capfinances Rouen Metropole Open (250) in Rouen, France. It is Stephens’ first title since 2022.
🏆 Suzan Lamens def. Clara Tauson 6-4, 5-7, 6-4 to win the Oeiras Ladies Open (125) in Oeiras, Portugal. In a wild final, Tauson was 0-5 down in the second set before winning seven games in a row but Lamens then recovered from 4-1 down in the third by winning five straight games for the title.

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📈📉 On the rise / Down the line

📈 Marta Kostyuk moves up six places from No 27 to No 21.
📈 Marton Fucsovics moves up 29 places from No 82 to No 53.
📈 Magda Linette moves up 12 places from No 60 to No 48.

📉 Carlos Alcaraz remains at No 3, but is dropping 1,000 points, wiping out his gap to Daniil Medvedev at No 4.
📉 Karolina Pliskova drops six places out of the top 50, from No 47 to No 53.
📉 Dan Evans drops 20 places from No 49 to No 69.

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📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP: 

📍Madrid, Mutua Madrid Open (1000) April 24 — May 5 ft. Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz (..?) Rafael Nadal (..?).
📺 UK: Sky Sports; US: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV
📍Savannah, Savannah Challenger (75) ft. JJ Wolf, Bernard Tomic

🎾 WTA:

📍Madrid, Mutua Madrid Open (1000) April 24 — May 5 ft. Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; US: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments as the tours continue.

(Top photos: Alex Grimm/Eric Alonso/Robert Prange/Getty Images)

MIAMI GARDENS, Florida — Danielle Collins wants to make one thing perfectly clear. She’s serious about this whole quitting tennis thing.

Really. 

The fiery 30-year-old Floridian — who has rolled into the final of the Miami Open, the closest thing she has to a home tournament on the tennis tour — has heard all the doubters. 

Sloane Stephens, the 2017 U.S. Open champion who has known and played against Collins since childhood, chalked it up to post-loss frustration when Collins first blurted out that she was done after this year following January’s heartbreaking three-set loss to Iga Swiatek in Australia. Jared Jacobs, the coach who was in Collins’ box for the last two Grand Slams, still doesn’t fully believe she will.

“We’ll see,” he says. 

Other friends on the tour approach with a shrug of their shoulders and ask, “Why?” — partly because they know, health permitting, how much better than them she can be.

None of it matters. Not the scare she gave the world No 1 Swiatek in Melbourne. Not her final run at a tournament just below the level of a Grand Slam, or the money she’s leaving on the table in likely future winnings and sponsorships. It’s all been great, but she’s done with it, or at least she will be at the end of the season. 

“I’ve been doing this a while,” she says, even though in relative terms, she hasn’t. She has only played professionally for two seasons longer than Coco Gauff, who is 10 years younger than she is.

Whatever. It sure feels to her like it’s been a while, and she’s got other goals, other things she wants to accomplish, other ways she wants to spend her time besides traveling the world, living out of hotel rooms, obsessing over the trajectory of a fuzzy yellow ball and whether her rheumatoid arthritis will allow her even to take the court the next day. She wants to start a family, sooner rather than later.

“I’ve loved what I’ve done and the opportunity and the doors it’s opened, but it’s not easy, and I am a homebody,” says Collins, an Australian Open finalist in 2022. “I’m a simple person. I like to water my plants and walk my dog and go for a coffee in the morning, and make sure the bed’s made. I got my special laundry detergent and have my little beauty stuff in the cabinets and, gosh, if I had to be at home all the time, every single day, I’d never get sick of it. I like reading my book. Doesn’t take a lot to make me happy.”

Surfing and yoga help. More of that is on the way. 

Now this is probably a good moment to point out that it would be a terrible idea for any of Collins’ upcoming opponents to mistake this for a lack of competitive fire in this moment or the rest of the season. She still rips the ball with abandon, especially on the backhand, playing that gas-pedal-to-the-floor style that can overwhelm opponents, as it did Caroline Garcia, the world No 23, in their quarterfinal on Wednesday. Collins took her apart in two clean sets, 6-3, 6-2, just days after Garcia had beaten both Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff.

On Thursday night she plowed on, smothering Ekaterina Alexandrova nearly from the beginning, beating her 6-3, 6-2 to make the finals of a 1,000 level tournament, just below the Grand Slams for the first time in her career. Alexandrova had beaten Swiatek in the round of 16. She will play Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan in the final on Saturday.

She was a set and a break down as Katie Volynets served for their match in Austin, Texas, last month. Her arthritis in her back had been so severe she had to make sure to toss the ball in front of her because she couldn’t arch backward on her serve.

No matter. She stormed back to win the second-set tiebreaker and the third set 6-0, deciding in what looked like the waning moments that since she was already out there in the gray chill, she might as well ride the adrenaline out of her pain and win.

“There’s very little you can do when a power player gets pissed,” Christo van Rensburg, Austin’s tournament director, said of Collins that day.

On Monday, Collins spent 89 minutes dismantling Sorana Cirstea of Romania in the round of 16, toppling her 6-3, 6-2 on the cozy Butch Buchholz Family Court at Hard Rock Stadium. There was a pack of rowdy Romanian fans sitting courtside, who cheered on Cirstea and razzed Collins throughout the late afternoon. 

When Collins wrapped up the final point of the hard-fought but ultimately one-sided win, she put her finger to her lips to shush them as she walked to the net for the handshake. She grabbed her bag and headed out of the stadium alone for the rest of her evening. Her box was empty. No parents. No coach. She’s flying solo. Keeping it simple, even though it’s likely her last home-state tournament, and her farewell season is certainly going a lot better at this point than other players (Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray) trying to manage a little glory in a final campaign. 

That’s sort of the way the dynamic has always been in the Collins family. Tennis is something she does, not who she is, and her parents would be just as proud of her if she was working behind a cash register, she insists. 

Her mother was a pre-school teacher and her father had a small landscaping business. Her father, who was mowing laws for a living until retiring last year at 84, used to wake up and hit balls with her before school, and get his friends to take her on at their local courts in St. Petersburg, Florida.

But the family couldn’t afford the best coaches or to have her travel around the country, much less internationally, during her teenage years. Tennis was about getting an education, which she did, graduating from the University of Virginia as a two-time NCAA champion.

When she told her parents she had an opportunity to turn professional, they suggested getting a graduate degree instead. She has won more than $7million in prize money, though never once felt like she was playing for anyone but herself.

Their reaction to her planned retirement? Great, they want grandchildren.

“They’re probably like, ‘It’s about friggin’ time’,” she says. 

Had she not been a tennis player, that probably would have happened sooner, for reasons of desire and health. After years of doctors largely ignoring her complaints about heavy periods and intense menstrual cramps, she finally found one who listened and correctly diagnosed endometriosis, a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus.

After undergoing surgery to remove the tissue, her doctor told her that getting pregnant might also help suppress the symptoms — but that didn’t really work with her career, and she kept playing. After October, that will no longer be a concern.

She still plans to travel, and has already made a start. After getting eliminated from the Australian Open, she and her boyfriend went hiking in Tasmania amid the giant swamp gum trees. They’re not as big as redwoods, but not far off. She’s got a trip to South Africa planned for December. 

Will she miss tennis?

Maybe? She’s the sort of pro who can enjoy the feel of her strings on the ball against a weekend warrior, but she’s jealous of the baseball, basketball and football players who travel on private and chartered jets, and have home games and long off-seasons. She wishes she had home matches. She doesn’t, even though she has tennis courts at her home and more down the street.    

“If the format of tennis was different, it would be a totally different story and I’d probably reconsider it,” she said of her looming retirement. “But the way that this sport works, it’s very hard.”

(Top photo: Frey/TPN/Getty Images)

It happens every time that guy Carlos Alcaraz takes the court. One outrageously zany point where he does something that people who have been watching tennis for decades will swear on the life of their favorite doubles partner that they have never seen before. 

And they are probably right because even as he muddled (for him) his way through the past six months or so, experiencing some version of a sophomore slump, Alcaraz has never failed to produce the spectacular. 

On Sunday, in the final of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, the moment arrived a little more than halfway through the first set against Daniil Medvedev. 

A perfectly lofted short-range lob came at Alcaraz as he closed in on the net. At first, he thinks he can leap backwards and smack it — but halfway into that maneuver, he realizes he has to turn and spring and chase it down, which he does, just before it settles onto the purple hard court for a second time.

And that’s when the Alcaraz-of-it-all really takes hold. At the final moment, he realizes that because of the way he’s holding his racket in his forehand grip, he can’t get under the ball. At this point, pretty much everyone else who has ever done this for a living takes a desperate swat and the ball skitters across the ground into the net. Not so with Alcaraz. 

In a split second, he does this tiny wrist rotation and swipes at the ball with what in this moment is the backside of his strings.

And the point goes on and a few shots later, he cracks a forehand down the line and Medvedev watches it whistle by. 

And just like that, tennis was on its way back to where it was last summer, with Alcaraz staking his claim to the game’s present and future, leaving an opponent heaving on every stroke, clinching a title while watching a last error float off the court, then hugging his tennis father and coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, and his real father as thousands of fans bathe him in their roars of adulation.

Hours later, with a big glass trophy sitting next to him after his 7-6(5), 6-1 triumph, Alcaraz was at a loss to explain just what had happened on that little first miracle of a point. 

“Something happened to my feet that I couldn’t jump,” he said. “When something like that happens, you have to put one more ball in and just run to the next one.”

Alcaraz has said repeatedly in the last two weeks that he’s had a rough time the past few months. The losing was weird, sure, but the main problem was when he stepped onto the court, whether it was to train or compete, he struggled to find the joy that he had always felt when he had a racket in his hand. His family and his coaches kept asking him what was wrong. 

He had no answers for them, which, in some ways, made it worse. When he sprained his ankle in Rio last month, he was as low as he had been since the start of his career.

For nearly 200 years and probably longer than that, people have come to California for a restart, to relaunch their identity or to try to find their old, true one. And that is about what happened to Alcaraz over the past two weeks in the Coachella Valley. 

The boy came back, and when he did, the show took off once more and never more so than in those crazy moments of sprinting, wrist-flicking and passing up the line in the first set that sent the capacity crowd of 16,000 into its first frenzy. 

“Points like this one give me extra motivation to put a smile on my face,” he said — with a smile on his face. 

This was going to happen before too long. Alcaraz is simply too gifted and too dedicated to the sport to let this eight-month drought without a title go on much longer. Why would the arc of his early career be any different from that point? 

At the moment the first whispers of doubt were starting, when his close friend and rival Jannik Sinner was making his play for supremacy, Alcaraz surged to life. He beat Sinner in the semifinals here, ending the Italian’s 19-match winning streak, then got some revenge against Medvedev, who had ended his attempt to defend his title at the U.S. Open in September when this fallow period was just getting started. 

Alcaraz is nothing if not resilient, especially when an A-list crowd is on hand, as it was on Sunday in the desert. Rod Laver was there, and Maria Sharapova, and the actors Charlize Theron, Zendaya and Tom Holland. When Alcaraz is on the court, especially in a final, a tennis match evolves into a happening and for the first couple of years, he almost always delivered. When that stopped happening during the past eight months, something felt slightly off with the tennis universe. 

No more. The win gave Alcaraz his second consecutive title in what plenty of players and much of the sport consider the most important tournament that is not a Grand Slam. It was the 13th title of a career that is just getting going, even if the next time he claims the sport’s top ranking (it will happen soon enough) it will be his second go at No 1. In 2022, at 19, he became the youngest player ever to get to the top of the rankings.

When it was over, Medvedev sat with his coach, Gilles Cervara, in the locker room, told him he had no regrets about the afternoon, and asked Cervara if he did. A shot or two here and there, Cervara said, but this one was on Alcaraz’s racket.

Medvedev said that when Alcaraz raised his level in the first set, he “kind of managed to be there and to try to catch his level, but I was just a little bit down. In the end, this down was going down, down, down, and he was going up, up, up”.

Alcaraz wasn’t alone in setting the world back into order on Sunday. In the women’s final, Iga Swiatek beat Maria Sakkari to win her second Indian Wells title in three years. Swiatek won 6-4, 6-0, taking out Greece’s most successful female player with a crisp efficiency that has become her trademark. And Swiatek being Swiatek, the win came with at least one set of pure domination – a second set ‘bagel’ in the scoreline that so often adds an exclamation point to so many of her victories. 

Swiatek, 22, already the winner of four Grand Slams but none since June, showed her resilience last fall after she lost the No 1 ranking she had held for 76 weeks. By the season’s end, she had it back, but she stumbled early at the Australian Open, and with Aryna Sabalenka hitting her stride, Swiatek’s supremacy looked under threat. There were more reasons for jitters when things got started for her at Indian Wells 10 days ago. 

She opened against Danielle Collins, who had nearly beaten her in Australia. After that came Linda Noskova, the young Czech who sent her home in Melbourne. Collins got three games. Noskova got four. Both endured a second-set bagel. 

When Swiatek won here two years ago and then completed the ‘Sunshine Double’ two weeks later with a win at the Miami Open, it was a breakthrough moment for her. A master of clay court tennis, she had suddenly proven to herself that she could win on the hard court.

“This time, I’m just super happy with the work,” Swiatek said. 

Her opponents, not so much. They know she has turned her dominance and efficiency into a strategy that has translated into a 19-4 record in finals and six straight wins in the ultimate match because she has so much energy in her reserves.

“I’ve played bigger hitters, but at the same time she takes away time from you,” Sakkari said.  “It took me a couple of games to just get used to her timing.”

The scary thing for all the other women is that the sweet spot of Swiatek’s season, the clay court swing, is still three weeks away. In years past, stepping onto the red clay felt like coming home and she looked forward to it. 

“Now it doesn’t really matter,” she said in a bit of a flex.

For Alcaraz, the flexes often come in the form of those little miracles that he manages more than anyone else. Medvedev, who can pull off a few of his own every so often, knows the effect they can have when you do manage one.

“You feel like, OK, you can do more and more, hit stronger, hit faster and be better,” he said.

And that’s what happened as the match moved to the second set and its seemingly inevitable conclusion. At moments, it felt like the balls coming off Alcaraz’s racket were defying the laws of physics and not losing any velocity from the moment they shot off his racket to when they were bouncing up to Medvedev’s eyes or flying past him. 

Medvedev would pound the ball over and over and Alcaraz would send it back, unbothered.

“He makes one good shot, I’m in trouble and I lose the point,” Medvedev said. “It’s tough. Mentally it’s not easy to play against this.”

No one knows this better than Alcaraz. From 80 feet away, it’s not hard at all to see a foe’s shoulders sagging, his spirit breaking, his head shaking with amazement and helplessness.

And nothing quite helps matters, in one moment or over the long-term, like a little bit of magic thinking and hitting. That wild series of shots when the tension was rising, it’s good for the game, both his and wider one, he said, and more importantly good for his soul.

“I always say that I’m playing better with a smile on my face,” he said. “Points like this one don’t matter if I win it or lose it, it puts a smile on my face anyway. I think it helps me to keep improving my game on the match and showing my best tennis.”

The smart money says Alcaraz’s best tennis is yet to come.

(Top photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

For more than a month, the smoke signals out of Rafael Nadal’s camp have kept the tennis world on its toes, sparking predictions of everything from a triumphant spring on the red clay of Paris to him never playing another competitive match following yet another hip injury in Australia in January. 

The only thing that seemed clear was that the 22-time Grand Slam champion was prioritizing the clay court season in Europe this spring. Nadal said as much in January when he returned following a year-long layoff because of hip surgery. 

Sure, he was happy to be back and competing in Australia, where he won the year’s first Grand Slam as recently as 2022, but he was singularly focused on being in top form — or, at least, as close as he can get to it at this point — in three months when the red clay tournaments begin in earnest. 

That was part of why he skipped the Australian Open once he suffered a small muscle tear near his hip three matches into his latest comeback. Logic suggested Nadal would wait until tennis returned to the organic surfaces that are far less taxing on the body and where an ageing, injury-prone player like Nadal, who is 37 and plays the most physical style of tennis, would have the best chance of staying healthy. 

Few were surprised when he announced this month on social media that he was pulling out of a hard-court tournament in Doha. It was the second sentence of that post that caught some off-guard. 

“I will focus on keep working to be ready for the exhibition in Las Vegas and the amazing Indian Wells tournament,” Nadal wrote on Valentine’s Day.

That would be an MGM Resorts exhibition match against the 20-year-old Spanish sensation Carlos Alcaraz this weekend in Las Vegas, which will be streamed on Netflix, and then the BNP Paribas Open in nearby Indian Wells, California, which begins next week.

Now that struck some as odd. Still, there was plenty of time for him to pull out of those events and spend another few weeks in Spain preparing for the clay.

And then, last week, Novak Djokovic posted a picture of him and Nadal on the same flight as Nadal made his way to the United States. “Vamos”, Djokovic wrote. Game on — at least, in theory. 

Great company on the way to USA 🇺🇸 😎💪🎾 @RafaelNadal #idemooo #vamos @atptour #TennisParadise pic.twitter.com/UDB13mp4Ux

— Novak Djokovic (@DjokerNole) February 23, 2024

The question, though, is why? 

“If he is fit, he wants to play,” his longtime spokesman, Benito Perez-Barbadillo, said on Monday. “He is a tennis player and wants to play at the biggest tournaments. And he loves Indian Wells.”

As Patrick McEnroe, the commentator and former player calling the match against Alcaraz, pointed out, Nadal often thrives on the slow hard courts of Indian Wells, where he has won three times and made the finals on two other occasions.

Injuries in exhibitions are extremely rare, but will an exhibition and a hard-court tournament in March, even one Nadal loves as much as Indian Wells, improve his chances of being fit enough to compete for the title at the French Open in May and June, where he has won 14 times and there is a statue of him swatting his bull-whip forehand outside the main stadium? In recent years, Nadal has shut himself down after Indian Wells for roughly three weeks to begin honing his timing and conditioning for two months of clay court tennis, where the timing and style of play are markedly different from hard courts.  

Welcome back, champ 👋

📷: @RafaelNadal | #TennisParadise pic.twitter.com/oVdoxv5JH0

— BNP Paribas Open (@BNPPARIBASOPEN) February 26, 2024

The elephant in the room here is money.

It’s always uncomfortable to count other people’s money, to suggest what should be enough. That is especially the case with professional athletes, whose careers are generally over by 40 and who have grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle.

That said, Nadal has won more than $134million in prize money during his 20-plus-year career. He has collected tens of millions, maybe more, in sponsorship and appearance fees. Terms of his deal with MGM and MGM’s deal with Netflix are not public, but he is likely to collect at least $1million for the Alcaraz match given how much he and other players of his caliber have earned for playing similar events

Nadal won’t receive an appearance fee to play at Indian Wells, since it is a mandatory tournament for healthy players. He has other incentives. Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle who owns the tournament, has become a friend and hosts Nadal at his private resort. 

There, Nadal can pursue his other passion — golf. He has been known to play 18 or even 36 holes a day during his time in the desert and he’s already been out on the links in California.

It’s a good life. The question is whether he is risking the clay season, where he likely has his best chance to win a 23rd Grand Slam singles title. Nadal would likely try to dismiss that thinking or anything that might suggest he is some kind of clay court specialist. 

“I think it’s fine,” said Paul Annacone, the longtime coach (Roger Federer, Taylor Fritz) and commentator. “He’s in California practicing already, getting acclimated. So the only issue is if he’s not 100 percent.  Then don’t go. But I don’t think he’d be here in California if he wasn’t close to 100 percent and ready for Indian Wells.”

Days after pulling out of Doha, Nadal posted a video of himself practicing slow service returns with the caption, “Work in progress.” There have been more videos since he arrived in Indian Wells, but no footage of anything approaching intense. 

All of this has only added to the larger mystery surrounding when Nadal might call it quits for good. Last year, not long after his hip surgery, he suggested that 2024 would be his last season and serve as a kind of farewell tour as he visited the tournaments and cities that had meant the most to him during his career.

Then he showed flashes of his old self during his three matches in Australia and got a taste of the competition he craves. He has not committed to any hard-and-fast timetable since, insisting he is taking it day by day.

The Olympic Games tournament will take place at Roland Garros this summer, the site of the French Open. There had been speculation that might serve as his walk-off. Then he signed a deal to serve as an ambassador with Saudi Arabia’s tennis federation and to play in an exhibition in Riyadh in October with Djokovic, Daniil Medvedev, Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Holger Rune. That setting would seem like an odd choice for his final matches. 

The Davis Cup finals will take place in Spain one month later. Perhaps then?  That is, assuming he can make it that far without another serious injury.

For now, and for better or for worse, he has a big payday in Las Vegas and a hard court tournament (and plenty of golf) in the California desert to focus on.

(Top photo: William West/AFP via Getty Images)