Naomi Osaka’s French Open and the ebbs and flows of a tennis comeback

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — Everyone has them, those places that always seem to bring pain.

For Naomi Osaka, it’s Roland Garros, and it goes far beyond the red clay that has always felt unnatural to a self-described “hard-court kid.”

She’s never been past the first week here. In 2020, she skipped the French Open altogether. The next year, she pulled out, following a standoff with tournament organizers over mandatory appearances at post-match news conferences while she managed the impact of anxiety and depression on her tennis and her health.

Monday, she took a one-set lead against Paula Badosa, the No. 10 seed and the latest in a series of brutal early draws at Grand Slams. She did it by flowing through a tiebreak, taking the match off the Spanish player’s racket the way she has done to so many over the years.

Then her hopes slipped away, first in a flood and then more slowly and painfully. After losing the second set 6-1, Osaka found herself caught between decisiveness and caution break point down, after calmly setting up the opportunity to see off the danger. She pushed a backhand long, and three games later, Badosa was through, 6-7(1), 6-1, 6-4.

Roughly 90 minutes later Osaka appeared with puffy eyes at a news conference. She was asked if these losses hurt more than they used to.

“Yeah,” she said.

Why?

“I think as time goes on, I feel like I should be doing better,” she said.

Then she couldn’t help but drift to the idea that haunts so many once-young tennis phenoms, especially a Black Japanese woman who grows up in America and is told that they are destined to become the next Serena Williams. Especially someone who beats Williams to win their first Grand Slam title, in a maelstrom of anger and remonstration on Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York City that soured a moment that should have been only joyful.

For Osaka, born in Japan to parents who are Japanese and Haitian and raised largely in Florida, that impossible legacy has hit home every day since she hired Mouratoglou, Williams’ coach of a decade, last fall.

“I kind of talked about this before, maybe a couple years ago, or maybe recently, I’m not sure,” she said.

“I hate disappointing people. So, like, even with Patrick, I was thinking this just now, but he goes from working with, like, the greatest player ever to, like, ‘What the f— this is? You know what I mean? Sorry for cursing, I hope I don’t get fined, but…”

Then the tears truly came. She left the dais for a few minutes to gather herself, and returned to answer another two questions, putting a brave face on another sad moment that was so different from the bittersweet one she lived through this time last year. And so different from the one three years ago, which began Osaka’s retreat from the elite that she has never quite rebounded from.

In 2021, four days before the start of the tournament, Osaka announced that she would not do any news conference in Paris. The message she posted, which compared forcing players to field negative questions after a loss to “kicking a person while they are down,” made plain the pain the sport was causing her.

Tennis leaders threatened to kick her out of the tournament and subsequent Grand Slam events. That she had stormed to four Grand Slam titles in three years, becoming the world No. 1, the world’s highest-paid female athlete and a fearless activist for civil rights, seemed to matter little.

Osaka withdrew from the tournament. Then she took a seven-week break from tennis that ended when she lit the flame at the Tokyo Olympics. Disappointing losses, another four-month break, injuries and comebacks followed, before Osaka gave birth to her daughter, Shai and went on the extended hiatus that turned into the big comeback.

So often, a return to her former heights has always looked one big win away. Never more so than last year at Roland Garros, when she was a point away from beating the defending champion Iga Świątek in the second round. Świątek came back from 3-5 down in the third set that afternoon, not in a storm of winners, but with the understanding that if she could just ask Osaka to meet a moment she hadn’t experienced for a long time, Osaka might discover that the answer was just out of reach. The then-world No. 1 stole the match 7-5. They embraced at the net, in a meeting of players who have taken over tennis and assumed the role of world No. 1 in ways that don’t always align with public expectations.

Later, Osaka talked about the pain she had felt right after coming up just short.

“I cried when I got off the court, but then, I realized I was watching Iga win this tournament last year, and I was pregnant. It was just my dream be able to play her. When I kind of think of it like that, I think I’m doing pretty well,” she said. She was trying not to be too hard on herself.

“Osaka also said that “the results aren’t resulting right now,” displaying a comfort that looked a world away Monday, when she found not being hard on herself to be as hard as it had ever been. She hasn’t made nearly the progress she thought she would during the past year.

During an interview on Saturday, Osaka compared the difficulty of her attempted comeback climb to her initial ascent to the top of the sport. That one hadn’t been so fast, either.

She was 20 when she toppled Williams at the 2018 U.S. Open. Belinda Bencic and Jelena Ostapenko, who were also born in 1997, were ahead of her.

“It was a little bit of a roller coaster,” she said of her formative late teenage years.

During her time away from the sport — essentially from the middle of 2022 until the start of 2024 — tennis changed on her. So many of the best players can move and exert power.

“Everyone is able to finish the point,” Osaka said. “When I grew up, there was, I want to classify them as pushers a little bit, and clearly there aren’t really pushers anymore.

“Everyone has the ability to finish the point when they want. For the majority, everyone is quite fast and powerful. It might not be tennis-related, but definitely on a physical scale, everyone is working a lot harder.”

She was also more hopeful about what she could do on the clay than she had ever been. Osaka has leaned into the surface this spring as she never had before leaving her baby daughter, Shai, in California to train with Mouratoglou at his academy in the south of France. The four-time Grand Slam champion trained hard for two weeks, then suffered a first-round loss in Madrid to Lucia Bronzetti, who she beat a year ago in Paris to set up the match against Świątek.

She resisted the temptation to fly home for a quick visit with her daughter, and went to a minor league tournament in St. Malo, France where she seemed to finally find her way: as a stranger on a strange surface in a strange environment that she hadn’t experienced in nearly a decade. Nine consecutive wins later, she landed in the fourth round of the Italian Open. Her match with American Peyton Stearns went to a third-set tiebreak, the sort of moment when Osaka used to thrive.

She came up short, but the French Open beckoned. A year and a half into her comeback from maternity leave, she knew once more what winning felt like. She was ready to do this, to compete with really good players. She has had to do it at majors for some time: since the 2024 Australian Open, her defeats have come to players who are either inside the top-10 or were fewer than 12 months before Osaka met them.

“I think there are parts of my game that suit every surface,” she said. “I feel like I just have to learn those parts and at the moment obviously hard is the surface that comes most naturally to me because that’s the surface I’ve played on since I was a kid. So am like super excited to have won the tournament on clay and be here now.”

She has grown to trust Mouratoglou, who prides himself on not making tennis more complicated than it needs to be,

“There are moments where we both sort of laugh about it, how simple it could be,” she said. “I don’t talk that much. So he does have to figure me out and I think I am a little bit different from his past players, but he seems to be enjoying the challenge in that and for me I enjoy working with him.”

That all seemed forever ago late Monday afternoon, when Roland Garros once more had done a number on Osaka and it was time for her to start thinking about what the season on grass — another surface that has long troubled her — might look like.

“I wasn’t really expecting to lose in the first round, so it’s something that I’m going to have to work out,” she said.

The only thing perhaps was this: Roland Garros won’t be able to mess with her again for at least another year.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Tennis, Women's Tennis

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