Iga Swiatek overcame an early challenge in her quest for a fourth French Open championship in five years, surviving a match point before defeating fellow four-time major champion Naomi Osaka.
Swiatek won 7-6 (1), 1-6, 7-5 to go to the third round at Roland Garros, where rain halted much of the scheduled play on the outer courts on Wednesday.
Osaka, who returned to action in January after giving birth in July 2023, led 5-2 in the third set and had a match chance on serve at 5-3 before Swiatek broke with three successive games.
“For most of the match, I felt like I wasn’t really here and now,” Swiatek remarked in an on-court interview. “My mind was messing around at times. When I was under a lot of pressure, I was able to focus more and play better without worrying about the score or the fact that I was going to lose.
The match was the first in any competition between two women with four major titles since Venus and Serena Williams faced off in August 2020.
Swiatek, the world’s top-ranked player for the majority of the last two years, had won 13 straight matches entering Wednesday, as well as 15 consecutive French Open matches since her last loss in 2021.
At 22, she is attempting to become the youngest woman in professional history (since 1968) to win four French Open titles.
The other three seeds in Swiatek’s side of the draw have all lost, allowing the tournament favourite to advance to the quarterfinals.
She next faces 42nd-ranked Czech Marie Bouzkova or 135th-ranked Croatian Jana Fett.
Osaka is a former world number one who won two US Opens and two Australian Opens on hard courts between 2018 and 2021.
She became the first player to limit Swiatek to fewer than four games won in a French Open set since his tournament debut in 2019.
Osaka has never advanced past the third round at the French Open clay and last defeated a top-10 player on any surface in January 2020.
Granted, she has only faced three top-10 players in the last four years, with interruptions for mental health, an Achilles injury, and pregnancy leave last year. Daughter Shai walked for the first time on Friday.
This season, Osaka has played ten events, her highest in the first half of a year since 2018, with one quarterfinal appearance. If just tournaments from 2024 are considered, she is ranked 42nd.
She did win three matches in her penultimate tournament before the French, including victories over top-20 players Daria Kasatkina and Marta Kostyuk.
“I’m a person who kind of thinks that I can win every match that I play,” Osaka said after her first-round three-set triumph against 67th-ranked Italian Lucia Bronzetti, her first match win at a Slam since the 2022 Australian Open. “That’s kind of gotten me this far.”
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