PARIS – It will be an unfamiliar home stretch this year at Roland Garros. After two decades of Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic or Roger Federer playing leading roles, none of them will be in the mix for the semifinals on Friday.
The last time that occurred was 2004. The top-ranked Federer was beaten early. Nadal was injured and unable to make his French Open debut. Djokovic was still a bristle-haired teenager, paying his dues in Challengers and Futures far from the spotlight.
In that pre-rafaelite moment at Roland Garros, Gaston Gaudio and Guillermo Coria played in an all-Argentine final. Coria was the favorite and took a two-set lead but cracked and Gaudio carpe-diemed, saving two match points and winning a five-setter that was both excruciating and thrilling to observe.
It was the first major final for both Gaudio and Coria and also their last: neither made it past the quarterfinals at a Grand Slam tournament again.
How times changed as the Big Three became serial champions and contenders for the long haul, expanding each other’s limits and winning a combined 66 major titles. And now times have changed again with a new generation of players taking the reins in Paris and beyond.
On Friday, the main attraction will come first when Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz play in the opening semifinal. They will be followed by Alexander Zverev and Casper Ruud, which is a heavyweight matchup on any clay court but not the match of the day when Sinner vs. Alcaraz is on the schedule.
It is an elite, new-age quartet even if none have won Roland Garros.
Ruud has come closest to the prize: losing in the final to Nadal in 2022 and Djokovic in 2023. Zverev has won four Masters 1000s on clay and reached four consecutive French Open semifinals. Alcaraz has won Madrid twice and was a semifinalist last year at Roland Garros. Sinner has not yet won a top-tier title on terre battue but has been the player of the year so far and is guaranteed to become the new No. 1 on Monday.
Sinner would surely have gotten there even if Djokovic had not been forced to withdraw with a right knee injury after his long-form, fourth-round victory over Francisco Cerundolo. Djokovic would have had to win the title again in Paris to keep Sinner from becoming the first Italian to reach the top spot.
That is now a moot point as Djokovic underwent surgery in Paris on Wednesday to address the torn meniscus. On Thursday, he posted a photo of himself on crutches with his wife Jelena and members of his team.
“I had to make some tough decisions,” he posted. “I’m still processing it all, but I am happy to update you that the surgery went well.”
He offered up no timeline for recovery or details on the surgery, but L’Équipe, whose reporter Romain Lefebvre has done fine work on this story, reported that the procedure was performed by Antoine Gerometta, a French orthopedic surgeon who has operated on other top athletes. This procedure lasted about 15 minutes, according to Lefebvre, and was a meniscectomy, in which a torn portion of the meniscus is trimmed.
I communicated with two orthopedic surgeons whose judgment I trust, and both told me that if Djokovic had indeed opted for a meniscectomy, the recovery could be straightforward.
“If they are just trimming a piece of torn cartilage, it should be pretty quick,” said Dr. Nicholas DiNubile, who is based in the Philadelphia area and specializes in knee surgery. “Hitting balls again lightly in three or four weeks and hopefully back in six to eight weeks if all goes well.”
That scenario would seem to rule out Wimbledon, which begins July 1, and would keep Djokovic from trying to equal Federer’s record of eight men’s singles titles at the All England Club. That scenario would not rule out the Olympics, however. They begin in Paris on the red clay of Roland Garros on July 27, which is just over seven weeks away.
“That is a tight deadline, and it would need everything to go right,” DiNubile said. “The surface is also an issue because the clay is slippery and can be more challenging in that way. He also will be de-conditioned at that stage not being able to run for a long period. But if anyone can do it, it’s Djokovic, who is so fit and so focused and will have the optimal medical attention.”
The Olympics surely remain Djokovic’s biggest objective in 2024 with a gold medal the only significant tennis prize that he lacks. He won a bronze medal in singles at the 2008 Games in Beijing and finished in the toughest spot – fourth – in singles in 2012 in London and in the delayed Tokyo Games of 2021. He also finished fourth in mixed doubles in 2021.
That qualifies as unfinished business for a champion who has won everything that matters most in tennis on multiple occasions. He was unable to complete the true Grand Slam, falling at the final hurdle in 2021 when he lost the US Open final to Daniil Medvedev. That ship has surely sailed, but the goal of Olympic gold remains afloat with the caveat that this looks very much like the last chance (Djokovic would be 41 for the Los Angeles Games in 2028).
If he does come back in time for Paris 2024, Djokovic could have the advantage of being fresher than rivals who have done the French Open-Wimbledon double and had to switch surfaces from clay to grass and back to clay. But movement is the pillar of Djokovic’s phenomenal game, and there are no guarantees that he will be able to play with the same elastic abandon and big-point precision immediately after returning to the circuit. The challenge with the meniscus is that there is little blood flow in that area, which can slow healing. The other challenge is that Djokovic is 37 years old, although DiNubile indicated that patients under 40 tend to recover quickly, and Djokovic is, of course, no average under-40 patient or athlete.
If he opted so quickly for surgery, it was because he felt he had no other good choice. He hesitated and debated for months when he had right elbow problems in 2017 before choosing to have surgery that he termed a “small medical intervention” in February 2018. He returned to the tour and struggled before recovering his mojo in time to win Wimbledon in July and launch his climb back to No. 1 and a new era of dominance.
That period now appears over, although only someone with memory loss would rule out more patches of brilliance in light of Djokovic’s outlier drive and talent. But the wheel does turn, and upbeat endings are hardly guaranteed: see Federer losing his last Grand Slam match at Wimbledon to Hubert Hurkacz in straight sets. See Nadal losing in the first round to Zverev this year in what could turn out to be Nadal’s final French Open match.
What is clear for Djokovic is that after losing the No. 1 ranking to Alcaraz intermittently in 2023, he will lose it again on Monday to Sinner, the red-headed and level-headed Italian who has continued to set a torrid baseline pace in Paris, allaying concerns about the hip injury that forced him to withdraw from the Italian Open.
Sinner’s rise to the top spot, coming after his breakthrough Australian Open victory in January, is the best confirmation yet of the Italian tennis renaissance. Sinner is 22 and the four other Italian men who will be in the top 50 on Monday -- Lorenzo Musetti, Matteo Arnaldi, Luciano Darderi and Flavio Cobelli – are all 23 years old or younger. There is also 20-year-old Luca Nardi, who upset Djokovic in Indian Wells as a lucky loser this year and will be ranked in the low 70s.
“It’s an Italian invasion,” said Brad Stine, the veteran American coach who works with Tommy Paul.
It is also a youth movement, one in which the new arrivals, many of whom have known each other since childhood, are feeding off each other’s success and using Sinner --and Matteo Berrettini before him -- as benchmarks. Tennis history shows that healthy domestic competition is a great motor: see the Swedes in the 1980s; the Americans and Spaniards in the 1990s and 2000s.
The emergence of the Italian battalion has French journalists posing questions to their tennis leaders. France has not had a men’s Grand Slam singles champion since Yannick Noah won Roland Garros in 1983 and has never had a world No. 1 in men’s singles.
“Why is it working better in Italy” one reporter asked Ivan Ljubicic, the French national technical director and former coach of Federer.
“I don’t think at the very highest level that the system is the reason,” Ljubicic said. “It develops players and the mentality, but at the very highest level, it’s really about individual projects. The Italian federation is there if the players need help with their organization or need services. But it’s above all Jannik Sinner that is lifting everyone up. He is the reference point, and that’s what we are missing in France. If you look at the top 200, we are doing better than Italy. But when you have Sinner, and also Musetti and Arnaldi who are really strong, it helps.”
Ljubicic also pointed to the benefits of continuity in Italy, whose tennis federation is led by Angelo Binaghi.
“They’ve had the same president for 22 years, and have a continuity in their projects, which is is not possible in France,” Ljubicic said. “They made mistakes, for sure, but they invested a lot to have the ATP Finals and Davis Cup weeks in Italy. It’s a financial commitment but not just that. It’s also a state of mind about tennis.”
Let the study of Italian methods continue, but for now, what is top of mind also involves a Spaniard.
Alcaraz and Sinner have made a fine habit of bringing out the best in each other, whatever the surface, and they have split their previous eight matches on the main tour.
Sinner won two of their three matches in 2022 and again in 2023, but Alcaraz won their most significant match so far: the late-night, five-set 2022 US Open quarterfinal. He also won their only previous match in 2024: the Indian Wells semifinal in which Sinner took a tumble and strained his wrist.
Alcaraz returned to form in the California desert, defending his title, but he has played comparatively little since then because of injuries. To me, he looks like the more natural clay-courter with his mastery of spin, yen for the drop shot and fluid, all-court movement on the game’s grittiest surface. But Sinner patrols the baseline like no man in today’s game and can hit short-hop winners from anywhere.
Both have dropped just one set so far in this tournament, and their numbers are comparable in many areas. Sinner’s serving numbers, as usual, are superior. He has held 91 percent of the time to Alcaraz’s 85 percent, but Sinner’s percentage of break-point saves has dipped to a more mortal level. He has been near 80 percent for much of the last year but is at 67 percent so far at Roland Garros.
Alcaraz has the better returning numbers, breaking 43 percent of the time to Sinner’s 34 percent. Still, it will be strength against strength, forza against fuerza, in their first clay-court duel since Sinner defeated Alcaraz in the final of the ATP 250 in Umag, Croatia in 2022.
Both have come such a long way since then: all the way to No. 1 in fact. But this semifinal on Friday won’t be about the ranking. It will be about getting closer to a first French Open title, and whoever is celebrating when the fireworks are finished will have plenty more work to do against either Zverev or Ruud in the final.
CC