Salut! At the start of the tournament we were wondering how we’d cope without ‘just’ Carlos Alcaraz. But then Jannik Sinner departed and Novak Djokovic too, and then Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff along with nearly all of the men’s and women’s top ten, and it’s still been joyeux and amusant and incroyable. And after Aryna Sabalenka snatched defeat from the jaws of victory yesterday, guaranteeing two first-time grand slam champions this weekend, there’s a wonderfully exciting sense of the unknown and the feeling that anything could happen on women’s semi-finals day – but it’s also impossible to ignore the shadow that Russia’s war in Ukraine has cast over the draw.
No one has felt that shadow more painfully this fortnight than Marta Kostyuk, who found out hours before her first-round match that a missile had struck close to her family home in Kyiv. Aged 23, it has taken Kostyuk time as a player to piece her rich talents together. Now, fuelled by the knowledge she represents something so much bigger than herself while simultaneously being able to put tennis into perspective, she’s on a 17-match winning run on clay and is playing with the belief she belongs at the top – but in Russia’s Mirra Andreeva she faces the highest-ranked player left who was already being ordained as a future slam champion when she burst into the semi-finals as a precocious 17-year-old in 2024.
Kostyuk did manage to defeat Andreeva in the Madrid Open final a month ago – and if she can pull off victory on an even bigger stage to become the first Ukrainian woman to reach a major final, she could face another Russian, Diana Shnaider, on Saturday. Shnaider, having stayed so impressively calm in the eye of Sabalenka’s storm yesterday, plays fellow slam semi-final debutant Maja Chwalinska, the Polish qualifier who is enjoying the run of her life but who, like Kostyuk, is very aware there are bigger challenges in life than sport, having taken an indefinite break from tennis five years ago because of depression. The promise of two absorbing semi-finals is why we’re here today, but these matches are about so much more.
L’action commence: à 15h (2pm BST). Allons-y!
