At a French Open where tennis is rapidly becoming overshadowed by politics, the infectious joie de vivre of Carlos Alcaraz promises to be a saving grace.
A day after a tense meeting between Ukraine’s Marta Kostyuk and Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus, and barely an hour after Novak Djokovic had ignited controversy by signing a TV camera with a political message, Alcaraz illuminated the tournament with a virtuoso performance to breeze past Flavio Cobolli, a 21-year-old Italian qualifier ranked 159 in the world, 6-0, 6-2, 7-5.
Do not be fooled by the score-line. Cobolli, a powerful, elegant ball-striker making his grand slam debut, did not play badly, far from it. But Alcaraz’s joy at returning to the grand slam stage for the first time since the US Open was palpable, and manifested itself in a scintillating exhibition of shot-making that delighted the Court Suzanne Lenglen crowd, the Spanish world No 1 and his team, and even, at times, Cobolli himself.
Alcaraz was beaten early in Rome by Hungary’s Fabian Marozsan, another gifted young player ranked outside the top 100, but any possibility that he might suffer a hangover from that defeat was immediately dispelled. With three games gone, Alcaraz was sliding wide to his left to steer a backhand around the net post for a winner. Minutes later, he produced an exquisitely disguised drop shot from a position so wide and so deep that most players would have been content merely to keep the ball in play. At one point he turned to his coach, the former world No 1 and 2003 champion Juan Carlos Ferrero, offering a smile that was half glee, half disbelief.
As the contest wore on, those emotions were increasingly mirrored by Cobolli. It began with the Italian casting the odd quizzical look across the net. When Alcaraz glided on to what would have been a point-ending dink against anyone else, angling a winner across the face of the net, Cobolli gazed in disbelief. When Alcaraz repeated the trick at the end of a lung-busting sprint midway through the third, conjuring a magical, shoelace-level flick at full pelt, Cobolli threw his arms in the air in sheer incredulity. Both men laughed after that one. A catchphrase writer’s dream, Alcaraz makes the impossible look ordinary.
Moments later, an almost casually caressed half-volley drew a similar response from the Italian. But there is a reason Cobolli is ranked seventh in the race to qualify for the Next Gen ATP Finals. With the contest seemingly over, he went for broke and briefly threatened to extend the entertainment into a fourth set.
Swinging freely, matching and perhaps even eclipsing Alcaraz’s power, Cobolli saved three match points before chasing down a drop shot to break with a mighty forehand winner. It was a magnificent effort, but the Spaniard does steel as well as he does silk. Switching to warrior mode, Alcaraz saw out the win in combative style to set up a second-round meeting with Japan’s Taro Daniel.
“I try to forget it’s so serious, I try to enjoy [myself] on court,” Alcaraz told Mats Wilander, a three-time winner in these parts, in his on-court interview. “I love playing tennis, and for me that’s the most important thing.
“That’s something that I try to do in every match, and for me it’s the most important thing, to enjoy and to smile on court.
“[Ferrero] always tells me before the matches that the most important thing is to enjoy. He told me a lot of times that he enjoys watching my tennis as well.”
It was all a far cry from the more serious business going on elsewhere.
After defeating Aleksandar Kovacevic of the United States 6-3, 6-2, 7-6 (7-1) on Court Philippe Chatrier, Djokovic stoked political tensions by inscribing a camera lens with the message: “Kosovo is the heart of Serbia. Stop the violence.”
It was a refence to recent unrest in Kosovo following local elections last month. The former Serbian province declared independence in 2008, but is not recognised as a separate state by Serbia. The appointment of ethnic Albanian mayors in northern Kosovo last month, when local Serbians boycotted elections, leading to a turnout of less than 4%, has led to clashes between Serbian demonstrators and local police and Nato peacekeepers.
“I am not a politician and I have no intention of getting into political debates,” Djokovic, whose father Srdjan was born in Kosovo, told Serbian media.
“As a Serb, it hurts me a lot what is happening in Kosovo, our people who are expelled from the municipalities. The least I could do is this. I feel responsible as a public figure – doesn’t matter in which field – to give support. Especially as the son of a man who was born in Kosovo, I feel the need to show support to all of Serbia.”
Djokovic, a two-time champion in Paris and seeded to meet Alcaraz in the semi-finals this year, said he did not know if he would be punished for his comments, but made it plain he would not be deterred from making similar expressions of support in future.
“I am not holding back, I would do it again,” said Djokovic.
Earlier in the day, Elina Svitolina marked her first grand slam outing as a mother with a 6-2, 6-2 win over Italy’s Martina Trevisan, the 26th seed and a semi-finalist in Paris last year. Svitolina, who is married to the French star Gaël Monfils and gave birth to Skaï, the couple’s first child, last October, only returned to the tour two months ago in Charleston, but won a title in Strasbourg last week and promptly pledged to donate her prize money to help children in her native Ukraine. Asked about the spat between Kostyuk and Sabalenka, Svitolina made her feelings plain.
“A lot of rubbish is happening around the situation, where[as] we have to focus on the main point of what is going on,” said the former world No 3. “A lot of people, Ukrainian people, need help and need support.
“We are focusing on so many things like empty words, empty things that are not helping the situation, not helping anything.
“So right now my focus, and I want to invite everyone to focus, [is] on helping Ukrainians. That’s the main point of this, you know, to help kids, to help women who lost their husbands because they are at the war and they are fighting for Ukraine.
“We are missing the main point that people now at this time, they need help as never before. The kids, you know, they’re losing their parents, they’re losing parts of their body.
“There are so many things that we can do [to] help in different ways. You can donate a couple of dollars that might help and save lives. Or donate your time to something to help people.
“You know, we are missing the main point of all of that and talking, talking, talking about nothing.”
In using her platform to advocate for a cause far bigger than any tennis tournament, Svitolina offered a powerful reminder that sport does not exist in a vacuum – even if the outlandish skills of Alcaraz may sometimes make us wish otherwise.