‘Last French player standing’: Roland Garros crowd adopts Ukraine’s Svitolina

When Anna Blinkova battled her way into the third round at Roland Garros, ousting the local favourite Caroline Garcia, the young Russian must have thought she had weathered the worst of the French Open’s raucous fans.

The crowd at her next match, however, turned out to be just as partisan.

There were no French players left in the draw by the time Blinkova took on Ukraine’s Svitolina on Court Simonne-Mathieu. But her opponent might as well have been sporting the French tricolour, such was the support she enjoyed.

Svitolina later credited the crowd, which included her husband and local favourite Gaël Monfils, with inspiring her thrilling 2-6, 6-2, 7-5 victory – her second fightback from a set down at this year’s French Open.

She did much the same two days later after ousting another Russian, the ninth seed Daria Kasatkina, in two hard-fought sets (6-4, 7-6), to the delight of a packed Court Suzanne Lenglen, the tournament’s second showpiece arena.

“I’m just thankful to the crowd to be there for me,” said the 28-year-old after the match. “In some matches I was a set down, but they were cheering me on and giving me this push and this hope that I can come back and win.”

She added, smiling: “Last French player standing.”

‘I’m 17 again’

Svitolina’s remarkable run at Roland Garros, just eight months after she gave birth, has provided the fairy tale French fans were craving after the latest dismal campaign by home players.

The host country fielded a total of 28 players in singles this year, none of whom made it past the second round. The debacle came as France marked 40 years since Yannick Noah’s 1983 triumph, the last time a Frenchman won on the Paris clay.

Svitolina got a taste of the French public’s affection in the run-up to Roland Garros, when home support carried her to victory at the Strasbourg Open, where she also defeated Blinkova in the final.

“I already knew from Strasbourg that a lot of people supported me,” she said at the French Open on Sunday, before touching on her relationship with Monfils, who gave home fans a night to remember with his thrilling first-round win over Argentina’s Sebastian Baez – only to pull out the next day with a wrist injury.

“We have been married for a couple of years now. I’ve been with Gaël for over five years. I didn’t expect that it would come like this year,” Svitolina said, referring to her surge in popularity among local fans.

With 17 titles to her name, Svitolina was long tipped as a future Grand Slam title winner, though semi-final appearances at Wimbledon and the US Open, both in 2019, are the closest she has come.

A former world number three, the Odesa native is now ranked at a lowly 192, owing to the lengthy break she took from tennis, citing health problems and mental exhaustion over Russia’s invasion, followed by her maternity leave.

Reflecting on her fourth quarter-final appearance at Roland Garros, she said she was playing with the freedom of a teenager in her latest quest to break her Grand Slam duck.

“Right now, I don’t have that pressure that I used to have before,” she told reporters on Sunday, noting that expectations were low when she entered the tournament.

“I feel almost like I’m 17 again coming on the tour fresh,” she added. “I’m not defending any points. Not here, not next week. Yeah, I feel like more free.”

In the shadow of war

While Svitolina’s tennis comeback has captured imaginations in France, so has her activism in support of her war-torn home country, whose plight has been a recurrent subject of conversation – and controversy – at Roland Garros.

When asked what motivated her to return to the WTA Tour in April, Svitolina said she hoped to “bring moments of joy” to the people of Ukraine and the children in particular.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion last year, Svitolina has been at the forefront of charitable campaigns to help Ukraine. She donated her prize money from the Strasbourg win to charities helping Ukrainian children and has promised to do the same with her earnings from the French Open.

After her first-round win on Monday, Svitolina blasted the “empty words” being spoken about the war, calling for the conversation to focus on the suffering of Ukrainians and how the tennis world can provide concrete help.

“I want to invite everyone to focus on helping Ukrainians, to help kids, to help women who lost their husbands,” she said. “We are missing the main point that people at this time need help as never before. The kids are losing their parents, they are losing parts of their bodies.”

>> Read more: At French Open, Ukraine war shatters myth of sport as an apolitical bubble

Like her fellow Ukrainians at Roland Garros, she has refused to shake hands with players from Russia and Belarus, pointing to the optics of exchanging courtesies at the net at a time when Russian bombs are raining down on Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

She did, however, exchange a thumbs-up with her opponent on Sunday, the most outspoken Russian player since the invasion of Ukraine, thanking Kasatkina for her words of support for Ukraine and describing her as “really brave”.

Svitolina will be the underdog on Tuesday when she faces Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, the world number two, in a politically charged battle for the semi-finals.

The Australian Open champion has found the press rooms at Roland Garros harder to manage than the clay courts, facing tough questioning over her individual stance on the war and her opinion of Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko, whose country served as a platform for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As a result, she has refused to honour her media commitments following her last two wins, claiming she does not “feel safe” in the press rooms.

Sabalenka is likely to face a partisan crowd on Court Philippe-Chatrier, the French Open’s centre court, when she takes on the “last French player standing”. Whatever the outcome, Svitolina has already warned there will be no handshake at the net.

“I have played the last two matches against Russian players so it will not change, everything will be the same,” she said. “I’m used to it now; it’s going to be the same.”