Wednesday felt like Osaka reclaiming command.
She fell, 7-6 (7-1), 1-6, 7-5, to world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in a second-round matchup that produced the type of quality suited to a pair of four-time Grand Slam champions.
But it was the best match of Osaka’s career on clay, especially given the opponent and the fact that it was just her fifth match at a Grand Slam since the start of the French Open in 2022. In addition to missing time to address her mental health in recent years, the 26-year-old had just returned to the sport in January after 15 months off during which she gave birth to her daughter, Shai, in July.
When she came back, she spoke of wanting to dedicate herself to learning more about her least favorite surface. Osaka is a power player who can match any of the game’s biggest hitters, and plodding red clay does nothing but slow her cracking groundstrokes and melt away her biggest strength.
But clay, Osaka has come to learn, reveals strength, too. It takes a different kind of power to control your legs while running on packed dirt, a different kind of fortitude to plan your way out of long point after long point. Try changing direction on a dime at full sprint on clay, as tennis players so often do, and feel all the different muscles your body recruits.
“I think clay is fun,” Osaka said Saturday, before the tournament began. “You get to slide around. You get to see how strong you are, in and out of corners. I think for me, there [are] a lot of really valuable lessons that I’m learning from clay-court tennis.”
Perhaps none were more valuable than the reminder that she can still produce top-tier tennis.
Osaka had never won a match on clay against a top-20 player before she did so twice at the Italian Open this month, defeating Marta Kostyuk and Daria Kasatkina en route to the fourth round. On Wednesday, she put everything she learned to use against Swiatek, who is exactly the type of fierce opponent Osaka gets up for.
Playing a champion of Swiatek’s magnitude — the 22-year-old is going for her fourth title at Roland Garros and is on a 16-match winning streak — forces Osaka to focus on herself. The crowd, which was so rambunctious Wednesday that the chair umpire had to repeatedly hold up play, reminded her of those in New York, where she has won half of her Grand Slam titles.
“I was kind of approaching it with how I approached my match against Serena [Williams] the first time in the U.S. Open,” Osaka said.
That apparently meant treating the clay court as if it were a hard court. Osaka stuck to an aggressive, high-risk game plan, blistering her groundstrokes and coming away with 54 winners to Swiatek’s 37. It helped that the roof was closed because of rain, which tends to speed up the court, and she could keep her balance as she danced around on the clay with a manner of comfort she had never achieved in her career. Chalk that up to the ballet classes she took with a coach to work on her movement in her post-baby comeback. “Feels like a portal into a new world,” Osaka said. “I feel very aware of my body in ways that I’ve never felt before.”
Those groundstrokes, though, felt like peak Osaka.
No one in the women’s game anticipates her opponent on clay as well as Swiatek, yet when the world No. 1 took some speed off her forehand in the second set, it was Osaka who was ready. She pounced, rattling off nine of 10 games to take the second set and jump to a 3-0 lead in the third, leaning on her serve — which topped out at 122 mph — to erase lost points.
But Swiatek has held her position at the top for so long for a reason. She regrouped mentally in the third just as Osaka’s lack of matches started to catch up with her and mistakes mounted, even as she led 5-2.
“I honestly didn’t believe I could win, because I would be pretty naive,” Swiatek said. “But it didn’t change the fact that I just tried to do work to play better.”
Osaka served for the match at 5-3 but sent a backhand into the net. Swiatek then calmly took the last five games, leaving Osaka crying as she left the court.
The tears didn’t last long. She said after the match she wrote a note to herself: “I’m proud of you.”
“I kind of realized I was watching Iga win this tournament last year, and I was pregnant. It was just my dream to be able to play her,” Osaka said. “When I kind of think of it like that, I think I’m doing pretty well. And I’m also just trying not to be too hard on myself. I feel like I played her on her better surface. I’m a hard-court kid, so I would love to play her on my surface and see what happens.”
