The chair came first. Aryna Sabalenka sank into it, red Nike shirt, red eyes, the posture of someone trying very hard to hold something together. Court Philippe-Chatrier had just watched the world No. 1 lose 10 consecutive games - including a 6-0 final set - to Diana Shnaider, a 25th seed playing in her first Grand Slam quarterfinal. Roland Garros, the one major that has always slipped the knot, had done so again. This time, it looked as though it had taken something with it.
The press conference that followed barely needed a question.
"No thoughts, no emotion," Sabalenka said. "I want to quit tennis right now. We'll see in a few days. Hopefully I can get back on track – mentally."
Sabalenka has never been one to hide, but this was something else, unguarded in a way that made the room uncomfortable.
She had come into this tournament as the last Grand Slam champion standing in the draw, her path seemingly cleared after Iga Swiatek's early exit. If there was ever a year for Sabalenka to end her barren run on clay and grass - four major titles, all on hard courts, the Australian Open twice and the US Open twice - this looked like it. She had moved through the draw in good shape. And for a set and a half on Wednesday, she had looked like a player on the right side of history: 6-3, 5-2 up, two points from the match.
Then came the hole.
"I don't know when was the last time that happened to me, that I lost ten games in a row," she said, when asked what she had tried to do to slow the collapse.
"I guess mentally I got into a very deep, deep dark hole over there, and I just couldn't get back on track mentally."
The body language on court had said as much. There was a moment in the third set where she stood still and screamed after a single lost point, the composure already gone, the scoreboard becoming something to be endured rather than managed. By the end, she had accumulated 57 unforced errors. Shnaider, playing her first major quarterfinal, had simply kept the ball in play and watched.
When a reporter noted the crowd's appreciation for her honesty and asked about her plans to recover, Sabalenka paused. A long pause.
"I honestly don't know. I guess I don't know." Another pause. "I don't know."
Then, almost despite herself, a flicker. She mentioned rage rooms – one of those venues where you pay to smash things – and said she planned to spend the next day destroying everything in sight. Whether it would help, she couldn't say.
"Well, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, I guess. At some point I’ll figure out the situation and we’ll get back tougher. By the way, I just figured out how I can overcome it – one of those rooms where you go in and smash everything. Probably I’ll spend a whole day tomorrow over there destroying stuff. Maybe it’ll help, maybe not," she said.
It was the most Sabalenka moment possible: raw despair, then a shrug, then dark comedy.
But underneath it sits a genuine problem she has now named herself. Asked directly about clay and grass, and whether the weight of never having won on those surfaces had begun to press on her, she did not deflect.
"Maybe I'm focusing too much on the fact that I've never won a Slam on them, and maybe that makes me overthink things, makes me over-emotional at some moments. I'm so tired of losing like this – not in the best way, just because I was over-emotional."
Last year it was a French Open final against Coco Gauff, surrendered in similar fashion. This year, a quarterfinal where she led by a set and a double break. The surface changes. The shape of the loss does not.
She will be back. She always is. But Wednesday in Paris felt like more than a bad afternoon - it felt like a reckoning she is only beginning to have with herself.
Source: India Today