PARIS — Martina Trevisan has been doing video chats from her hotel room with her mental coach every day along the way to the quarterfinals at Roland Garros, a run the 159th-ranked qualifier acknowledges is “a little” shocking, just not as much to her as to everyone else.
So after Trevisan’s 6-4, 6-4 victory against No. 5 seed Kiki Bertens at Court Suzanne Lenglen on Sunday, which was just as out-of-nowhere at this out-of-nowhere French Open as Iga Swiatek’s 6-1, 6-2 win against 2018 champion and No. 1 seed Simona Halep over at Court Philippe Chatrier, the 26-year-old from Florence, Italy, planned to stick to the routine.
It’s helped her for the past two years, not merely the past two weeks, which also featured unexpected wins over Coco Gauff and 20th-seeded Maria Sakkari.
Trevisan’s tennis coach, Matteo Catarsi, described one of the goals of the sessions with Florida-based Lorenzo Beltrame, whose clientele also includes three-time major semifinalist Johanna Konta, this way: “Not to feel uncomfortable in this environment, like someone who played in Grand Slam qualifying, but to feel like a queen, like a star.”
Trevisan and Beltrame chat. He gives her writing assignments. She works to find the right words to describe her thoughts and buttress her self-belief. The exercise is important for where Trevisan is these days, in her sport and in her life. It’s been quite a journey, one Trevisan said hopes offers others this message: “Don’t ever give up, even in the toughest moments, where it really feels like life wants the worst for you, like it doesn’t care about you at all. Stay strong and seek the light. Because there is light there, and it will arrive.”
A decade ago, shortly after turning 16 but beset by the pressure of others’ expectations, promising prospect Trevisan quit tennis, which her mother teaches and her brother played professionally (her father was a pro soccer player).
She had anorexia, an experience and recovery she discussed in detail in a blog post two months ago.
“I hated my muscular body and I lost weight by adopting a diet that was just enough to survive,” Trevisan wrote, saying she eventually sought help and “re-learned how to eat and to make peace with my wounds and to appreciate my new body.”
Then, having returned to tennis in 2014 from a 4 1/2-year break, having toiled at tiny events offering total prize money of $10,000, having moved up the rankings enough to enter the qualifying rounds at Grand Slam tournaments but failing on her first nine attempts to reach the main draw, she finally made a breakthrough this year.
Trevisan made her debut in a major’s 128-player bracket at the Australian Open in January after making it through qualifying, exiting from the first round with a straight-set loss to eventual champion Sofia Kenin.
Trevisan learned, though, that she was ready to compete with the best.
“I’m more confident,” she says now. “I know I belong here.”
While Rafael Nadal overwhelmed qualifier Sebastian Korda 6-1, 6-1, 6-2 — the 20-year-old American, whose father won the 1998 Australian Open, was so star-struck he asked his idol for an autograph after the rout — and U.S. Open champion Dominic Thiem held off French wild-card entry Hugo Gaston 6-4, 6-4, 5-7, 3-6, 6-3, the unpredictable outcomes kept arriving at Roland Garros in the fourth round Sunday.
U.S. Open runner-up Alexander Zverev lost 6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3 to 19-year-old Jannik Sinner of Italy, then said he had a fever and was short of breath, two symptoms that raise red flags during a coronavirus pandemic that postponed the French Open from May-June to September-October.
Sinner is the first man to reach the quarterfinals in his debut in Paris since — yes, you guessed it — Nadal 15 years ago and now faces the 12-time champion. Thiem, runner-up to the King of Clay the past two years, plays No. 12 seed Diego Schwartzman, a 6-1, 6-3, 6-4 winner against Lorenzo Sonego.
In the other women’s matches, No. 3 Elina Svitolina beat Caroline Garcia 6-1, 6-3 and next takes on Nadia Podoroska, a qualifier from Argentina who is ranked 131st and eliminated Barbora Krejcikova 2-6, 6-2, 6-3.
Like Trevisan, Podoroska never had won a Grand Slam match until this event.
The 54th-ranked Swiatek, a 19-year-old from Poland who ended Halep’s 17-match winning streak, also will be making her Slam quarterfinal debut when she meets Trevisan.
“Nobody surprises anybody anymore,” said two-time major champion Halep, who had to be taken aback at least a tad, considering she defeated Swiatek 6-1, 6-0 in 45 minutes a year ago in Paris.
Trevisan tossed her racket after closing out the biggest win of her career with a backhand lob she couldn’t see land; she knew the match was over when she saw the expression on 2016 French Open semifinalist Bertens’ face.
A giddy Trevisan frequently laughed as she spoke in Italian with reporters — about exactly how much she’s earned so far ($330,000, more than her total career winnings entering 2020), about how she’d describe her personality (“I try to smile a lot, and I do; but when I’m sad, you definitely can tell that I’m sad”) and whether, given everything she went through, Trevisan thought she could return to this level of play.
“Well,” she replied, “I’d never been to ‘this level.’”
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AP Tennis Writer Fendrich reported from Washington; AP Sports Writer Leicester reported from Paris.
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PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
