For Caroline Garcia, it was an afternoon that ended, as it began, with tears.
And perhaps that was fitting, for the 31-year-old Frenchwoman, who announced at the weekend that she intends to retire this autumn, has known her share of heartbreak at Roland Garros down the years.
Like any player from a grand slam nation, winning on home soil was always Garcia’s most cherished ambition, but a quarter-final run in 2017 will forever remain an outlier now.
She had failed to advance beyond the second round on all but three of her previous 15 visits to Paris and, as she waited in the Court Suzanne Lenglen tunnel before facing Bernarda Pera of the United States, the emotions swirling inside were palpable in her dewy-eyed demeanour.
There were near-identical scenes 90 minutes later, by which time a 6-4, 6-4 defeat had brought the curtain down on her French Open career. Yet Garcia has become accustomed to dealing with such emotions since deciding to bid farewell to a sport that, she said in a social media announcement, had brought extremes of love and hate, happiness and anger.
“Since the start of the year, I knew it would be my last season and my last Roland Garros,” Garcia told the crowd, battling to retain her composure. “I hesitated for a while before telling you, because I didn’t know if I’d be able to deal with my emotions.
“I have to admit that I’ve been crying since the start of the week. But I always played with my emotions – the good ones, the bad ones – and often, the stress and the wish to do things too perfectly stopped me, especially here, in Roland Garros.”
Often, but not always. While capable of losing to players with a fraction of her ability on her off days, at her best Garcia was one of the finest exponents of first-strike tennis in the sport, a player whose all-court ability and natural athleticism made her a match for anyone. The challenge, always, lay in casting aside self-doubt, in ignoring the observers who insisted she should rein in her high-risk, high-reward style.
Those voices were never louder or more plentiful than at Roland Garros, and it is perhaps unsurprising that Garcia’s finest singles run at a major came not on the Parisian clay, but in the concrete jungle of New York, where she was a semi-finalist in 2022. Garcia would go on to win the WTA Finals that year, equalling a career-best ranking of fourth, but a combination of injuries, faltering form and the sheer grind of life on tour, which diminished her joy for the game, made further progress elusive.
Whatever pain Garcia felt in playing her last singles match at Porte d’Auteuil, it will be as nothing compared to the physical pain she has endured. Earlier this year, she revealed in an emotionally charged social media post how a chronic shoulder injury had left her reliant on anti-inflammatory medications, corticosteroid injections and plasma treatments. She questioned the “mindset that athletes are conditioned into from a young age” that “playing injured is somehow honourable or necessary”, and wondered whether “the victories glorified by society” were really worth the physical toll.
“Is it truly worth pushing our bodies to such extremes?” wrote Garcia. “Is enduring chronic pain in your 40s – an outcome of years spent pushing athletic limits – something to be celebrated, or have we collectively taken sports too far?”
Those questions will have felt all the more urgent against the backdrop of happiness in her personal life. Last summer, Garcia announced her engagement to Borja Duran, a former associate professor at the University of Barcelona with whom she co-founded the Tennis Insider Club podcast. Always an involved presence at Garcia’s matches, Duran will have felt her pre-match show of emotion as keenly as anyone.
Once the racket was in her hand, though, a smile broke across Garcia’s features, one that broadened as sections of the crowd greeted each ball she struck in the warm-up with a cheer. The arena was sparsely populated at that point, most spectators having gone to stretch their legs after watching Carlos Alcaraz open his title defence with a straight-sets victory over the Italian qualifier Giulio Zeppieiri, but it was a taste of what lay ahead.
Spare a thought for Pera in all this. With just four wins all season, she could have wished for an easier first-round assignment than Garcia, a player of such abundant gifts that Andy Murray once tipped her as a future world No 1. Yet the 30-year-old Croatian-American went into the match with just one loss from their four previous meetings, and she made the most of that psychological edge.
When Garcia drilled a sumptuous inside-out forehand for a winner to hold in the sixth game, before fashioning her second break point of the afternoon, it seemed the locals were in for a good afternoon. But as chants of “Caro! Caro!” rained down from the stands, Pera refused to be intimidated. On an afternoon when her stinging southpaw serve would prove the bedrock of her game, she staved off the danger to hold, then went firmly on the attack, firing returns from inside the baseline, crushing approach shots and dispatching overheads with calm authority.
In the ninth game, Pera’s enterprise was rewarded with a brea,k and from there she rode her momentum to serve out the first set and secure an early break in the second.
Her task was made easier by some understandably sluggish movement from Garcia, who was playing her first match since mid-March and struggled at times to get in and out of the corners with her trademark agility. Still, no amount of pain was going to come between the Frenchwoman and a final crack at her home slam, and what she lacked in explosiveness she did her best to compensate for with her hand skills and anticipation.
Those qualities were never more apparent than when a venomous service return forced Garcia deep into her forehand corner early in the second set. With the ball almost behind her, Garcia somehow improvised a brilliant drop shot, loaded with backspin, then scrambled across the baseline to prod home a lobbed backhand winner with her opponent stranded at the net. That drew a broad grin from Garcia, but it was only her second point in 16, a bleak indication of the direction of travel.
A pair of unforced errors made it four straight games for Pera and, as mistakes continued to flow from Garcia’s racket, four quickly became six. Roused by the locals at the next changeover, the former world No 4 clawed back one of the breaks with a delicious blend of power and finesse, but Pera’s lead would prove unassailable.
“It was such an emotional match, even when we were back there [in the tunnel] I started crying,” said Pera. “Caroline is one of the nicest people on tour, and I’m honoured to get to know you and spend time with you and share the court with you.”
The reality remains that, even with her finest tennis of the day, Garcia could do no more than bring respectability to the scoreline – a reminder, if one were needed, of why she has decided to call it a day.
“I tried to give my best here,” said Garcia, handed the stage afterwards by on-court interviewer Alizé Cornet.
“I always dreamt of winning the trophy. Unfortunately, I will never achieve that goal. But all those great, positive moments, and the difficult moments shared with the French public will stay with me forever.”
As Paris made plain, the feeling is mutual.