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.

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As things turned out, Swiatek is not quite the grass-court specialist her early results might have suggested. But the two-time French Open champion is pretty useful on clay, a reality with which Pera became acquainted at first hand as Swiatek quashed any ambitions her opponent harboured of drawing her into another dogfight with an emphatic 6-3, 6-2 win at the Madrid Open.

It was a focused, disciplined performance from the world No 1, who was no more dismayed by the challenge of facing a dangerous, free-swinging southpaw than she has been by the altitude at the only big clay-court event she has yet to win.

“I wouldn’t say it was easy, every match is tricky here,” said Swiatek after reaching the last 16, just as she did on her only previous appearance at the Caja Mágica. 

“I’m pretty happy that I’ve played a little bit better every day, and I’m happy that I’m getting my rhythm. But playing a lefty is never easy. I think Bernarda really used it.”

Use it Pera did, troubling Swiatek in the early stages with her swinging left-handed serves and weighty forehands. The 28-year-old, who left her native Croatia at the age of 16 to represent the US, is an accomplished performer on the red dirt, as she demonstrated over a memorable fortnight last summer when she won the first tour-level singles titles of her career in Budapest and Hamburg. Capable of playing the brand of bold, first-strike tennis that has proved most effective against Swiatek, Pera threw down the gauntlet in the early stages, recovering from 0-40 to hold her opening service game before breaking to love behind some crushing returns.

They were fine moments for the American, but these days it takes more than just fine moments to defeat Swiatek. The Pole immediately replied in kind, peppering Pera’s backhand to claim a love break, and from there she never looked back. Indeed, such was Swiatek’s mastery that she dropped only seven more points on serve – a reminder of how much the bite and penetration of her delivery has improved since she was was beaten two years ago on the same court by Ashleigh Barty, who subjected her second serve to the sternest of examinations. 

With this result, Swiatek racked up a half-century of clay-court wins to overtake Serena Williams as the player with the highest winning percentage in clay-court events at this level. Given her consistency and quality of movement on the surface, not to mention her ability to attack or defend with equal dexterity, both statistics are likely to improve.

“Having both things combined and being able to do both, like Rafa [Nadal] or Novak [Djokovic] – they can play great in defence and kind of be patient, and also they can attack well – I think this should be the goal of every tennis player,” said Swiatek, who will face Ekaterina Alexandrova after the Russian 16th seed saw off China’s Qinwen Zheng 5-7, 6-4, 6-2. “That’s why we are working on both.”

Jessica Pegula also advanced in straight sets, although the only straightforward thing about her win over the Czech Republic’s Marie Bouzkova was the 6-4, 7-6 (7-2) scoreline. On a day when little came easily to the third seed, Pegula went up 5-2 only to find herself unexpectedly detained as Bouzkova, who had won three of their four previous meetings, fought off five set points. At the sixth time of asking, the American finally seized the initiative with a crunching forehand winner before establishing a commanding 2-0, 40-0 lead in the second set.

Again, though, Bouzkova battled her way back into contention, capitalising on some overcautious play from Pegula to fend off two match points in the 10th game, before forcing a tiebreak. 

“Marie is always tough, it’s a tough match-up for me,” said Pegula, who will face Italy’s Martina Trevisan, the 16th seed, for a place in the quarter-finals. 

“I don’t really love to play her, she always makes it very difficult, and we’ve had a lot of close matches, so I’m glad I won.”

In the men’s draw, Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev made relatively comfortable progress after being taken the distance in their opening matches. 

Alcaraz, who struggled to find his range against Finland’s Emil Ruusuvuori on Friday, delivered a vastly improved performance to see off Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov. After racing through the first set, the Spanish defending champion recovered from a break down in the second to seal a 6-2, 7-5 win. Zverev, who needed over three hours to subdue Roberto Carballes Baena in his opener, defeated Hugo Grenier of France 6-1, 6-0. 

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A week after she came through qualifying in Budapest to win the first tour-level singles title of her career, Pera, a 27-year-old American ranked 81st in the world, defeated top seed Anett Kontaveit 6-2, 6-4 in the final of the Hamburg European Open to claim her second. She has now won a dozen matches in a row, all without dropping a set. 

That the latest of those triumphs came against Kontaveit, who dispatched her in straight sets in the opening round at the All England Club, only underlines the spectacular alteration in Pera’s trajectory over the past two weeks. She left Wimbledon at a low ebb after a fifth successive loss sent her ranking plummeting to 130, her lowest position since October 2017. She will begin the North American hard-court swing at a career-high ranking of 54, and with some talking up her prospects as a dark horse for the US Open after her win over the world No 2.

While that may be stretching a point – Beatriz Haddad Maia compiled an identical unbeaten streak before Wimbledon, only to crash out in the opening round – Pera’s latest victory nonetheless feels like a watershed moment for a player who left her native Croatia at the age of 16 to represent the US. 

Four years ago, Pera defeated Johanna Konta in the second round of the Australian Open. It was quite the upset: Konta, the ninth seed, had reached the semi-finals the previous year, and although Pera was handily beaten by Barbora Strycova in the next round, the win marked her out as a player of note.

Pera subsequently found herself cast as an early-round danger woman, capable of troubling the best on her day but unlikely to be around come the business end of tournaments. She often lived up to that billing – a three-set defeat to Serena Williams two years ago in Lexington was a classic example – but Pera has always had the ability to do more. Now she has acquired the belief to express her gifts more consistently. 

Against Kontaveit, Pera exuded confidence from the outset. Sharp returning from the American earned her an immediate break, and from there she dominated the opening set behind her tricky southpaw serve, landing more than three in four of her first deliveries and winning 84% of the points when she did so. 

Pera’s dominance with ball in hand gave her the freedom to open her shoulders off the ground, and she was increasingly able to impose her big forehand in the baseline exchanges, testing Kontaveit’s rubber-limbed defensive skills to the limit. 

The pattern continued into the second set, where Pera established a 5-2 lead before Kontaveit, bidding for the first clay-court title of her career, clawed back a break as her opponent faltered for the first time. Pera held firm, however, serving out to claim her second clay-court title in as many weeks.

“I expected a good fight and I played well,” said Pera. “I was able to dominate the points and able to win.”

Pera afterwards dedicated the victory to her former coach Kristijan Schneider, who died of cancer in April at the age of 41.

“The tennis community lost a coach, a friend [and a] mentor,” said Pera. “I was lucky enough to be coached by him, and I want to dedicate this trophy to him and to his memory. I hope I can bring at least a little bit of his shine and passion and drive into the world.”

In the men’s draw, top seed Carlos Alcaraz saw off Alex Molcan of Slovakia 7-6 (7-2), 6-1. He will face Lorenzo Musetti in the final after the Italian defeated Francisco Cerundolo 6-3, 7-6 (7-3).

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