Veteran grand-slam queens Lindsay Davenport and Mary Pierce battled through to a French Open quarterfinal showdown on Sunday, but Bulgarian 15-year-old Sesil Karatantcheva gave notice that the clock is ticking on the old-timers. Men’s top seed Roger Federer eased into the quarterfinals for the first time in four years.
Umpires have been taking plenty of verbal abuse at the French Open. Damien Steiner of Argentina, the chair umpire for the match on Sunday between Rafael Nadal and Frenchman Sebastien Grosjean, was jeered long and loudly, first by Grosjean, then by the centre court crowd.
Amelie Mauresmo saw her French Open hopes go up in flames once again on Saturday on a bad day for the home fans. Mauresmo lost 4-6, 6-3, 4-6 to 17-year-old Serb Ana Ivanovic in a centre-court stunner as three other French women were sent packing from the third round. Meanwhile, the Russians were on a roll.
Venus Williams did plenty to beat herself, and 15-year-old Sesil Karatantcheva took care of the rest. The young Bulgarian upset an erratic Williams 6-3, 1-6, 6-1 on Friday in the third round of the French Open. Lindsay Davenport survived her toughest test yet and beat unseeded Frenchwoman Virginie Razzano 7-5, 4-6, 6-4.
Spain’s Rafael Nadal won the battle of the boy wonders in the French Open on Friday, dispatching home hope Richard Gasquet in straight sets to reach the last 16. The fourth seed won comfortably 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 to set up a tie against either France’s Sebastien Grosjean or Radek Stepanek of the Czech Republic
Top seeds Roger Federer and Lindsay Davenport took huge steps towards claiming first French Open titles on Friday as Roland Garros eagerly awaited the teenage duel between Rafael Nadal and Richard Gasquet. Federer survived a blistering first-set assault by Chilean 25th seed Fernando Gonzalez.
Andy Roddick failed to make it through the opening week at the French Open for the fifth time in as many tries, blowing a two-set advantage on Thursday and a fifth-set lead against Argentine Jose Acasuso. Roddick was broken twice after going ahead 3-1 in the last set and lost 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 8-6.
Last Saturday afternoon at the Palais des Sports in Paris, a dapper aristocrat called Philippe de Villiers assembled about 5 000 people who presumably had other things to do. His posters, plastered everywhere, were eloquent: ”We all,”’ they said, ”have a good reason to vote no.”
Justine Henin-Hardenne’s latest ailment failed to slow her down on Thursday at the French Open. The tournament favourite and 2003 champion advanced to the third round by beating Virginia Ruano Pascual 6-1, 6-4. Maria Sharapova, seeded second, committed just 13 unforced errors and beat 18-year-old Frenchwoman Aravane Rezai 6-3, 6-2.
Rafael Nadal and Richard Gasquet set up a dream French Open third-round showdown as teenage talent threatened to sweep the old guard out of Roland Garros on Wednesday. Top seed Roger Federer, bidding to win the only grand slam to have eluded him, moved ominously into the third round.
Triple champion Gustavo Kuerten, still recovering from the effects of two hip operations, slumped to his worst defeat in 10 years at Roland Garros on Tuesday when he was dumped out of the first round of the French Open. The 28-year-old Brazilian was the champion in Paris in 1997, 2000 and 2001.
Grand-slam record-setter Andre Agassi insists his shattering, injury-hit French Open first-round defeat will not rush him into retirement. The 35-year-old says he fully intends to play Wimbledon and the United States Open this year, even if he has to undergo more cortisone injections to dull the crippling pain he endured on Tuesday.
Andre Agassi’s record 58th grand slam appearance ended in a shattering first-round defeat at the French Open on Tuesday, the loss surely marking the final act of the 35-year-old American’s Roland Garros adventure. Dominant at the start and shaky at the finish, Justine Henin-Hardenne won her first-round match on Tuesday.
Russia’s Anastasia Myskina wrote herself an unwanted chapter in the Roland Garros record books on Monday when she became the first defending champion in history to crash out in the first round. There were no such dramatics in the men’s first round where Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Gaston Gaudio and Tim Henman all won in straight sets.
World number one Roger Federer of Switzerland cruised into the second round of the French Open on Monday with a straight-sets win over Israeli qualifier Dudi Sela. Rafael Nadal’s dream of becoming the first man in 23 years to win the French Open on his debut got off to a flying start on Monday with an impressive first-round win.
Amelie Mauresmo has tried to play down the Yannick Noah effect as she sets her sights on breaking her Roland Garros jinx at the French Open, which gets under way on Monday. Mauresmo has been touted as a potential winner in Paris since she burst on to the scene at the Australian Open in 1999.
Marat Safin has been voted the sexiest man in tennis, but it’s success at the French Open he really craves as he desperately tries to pull his season out of a depressing tailspin. His second career grand-slam victory at the Australian Open in January has been the only highlight of what has become a wretched 2005.
Confounding pollsters, pundits and politicians alike, public opinion in France has swung back behind a no vote to the new European constitution, say three surveys published on Wednesday. Less than two weeks before France’s May 29 referendum on the treaty, newspaper polls showed support for the no camp, trailing since the end of April, had bounced back to between 51% and 53%.
Roger Federer’s campaign to become only the sixth man to win all four grand slams faces another gruelling examination at the French Open, a tournament where his mediocre record shames his standing as one of the greatest players of all time. In six visits to the French Open, Federer has never got beyond the quarterfinals.
Côte d’Ivoire’s main opposition parties signed a deal in Paris on Wednesday ahead of general elections later this year, an alliance that will see them govern together should they defeat President Laurent Gbagbo. The agreement formalises an alliance born last year at talks in Ghana, aiming to jumpstart the moribund Ivorian peace process.
A tiny Canadian shrub is the quickest-moving thing in the plant world, using a catapult mechanism to eject its pollen at a speed hundreds of times faster than a launched rocket, scientists have found. The plant, bunchberry dogwood, grows in thick carpets in the vast swampy, spruce-fir forests of the North American taiga.
An embattled Jacques Chirac this week appeared live on television in an attempt to swing reluctant France around to a yes vote in the country’s referendum for the European constitution. His campaign has so far failed to allay deep-rooted French fears that they are about to fall under the dark shadow of an Anglo-Saxon, neo-liberal model of Europe.
Jenson Button’s BAR Honda team were on Thursday banned from competing in the next two grands prix after being found guilty of ”highly regrettable negligence” at last month’s race in San Marino. The verdict falls way short of the season-long ban called for by motor racing’s governing body, the International Automobile Federation.
Thousands of journalists in some of the most press-hostile countries held marches and sit-ins on Tuesday to demand an end to government censorship and jailings and to highlight the threat of killing, kidnapping and other abuses they face.
Several events were under way or scheduled for the 15th annual World Press Freedom Day.
Salvation may be at hand for chocolate gourmets concerned about their complexions and addicts looking for a calorie-free cocoa fix with a new trend for chocolate-based beauty treatments. Several Paris day spas now aim to disprove the theory that chocolate and smooth skin don’t mix.
An air of change is pervading the European peloton ahead of this year’s big rendez-vous, when Lance Armstrong puts his yellow jersey up for grabs in his last ever race. The Tour de France is set to provide drama of epic proportions when the 33-year-old American puts his champion’s credentials on the line in July.
Experts have discovered a major network of underground funerary chambers and arches near the original site of the ancient Axum obelisk in Ethiopia, Unesco said on Monday. The discovery was made last week during a surveying mission in the East African country in preparation for the return of the final piece of the 1 700-year-old obelisk from Italy.
Insect experts are at odds over plans to name three newly discovered species of slime-mould beetle after United States President George Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. The guardians of animal nomenclature fear the slimy monikers may be a godsend for satirists, <i>New Scientist</i> reports.
A species of Amazonian tree ant builds elaborate traps to snare its prey, which is then stretched like a victim on a medieval rack before being hacked to pieces. With cunning and patience, Allomerus decemarticulatus worker-ants cut hairs from the stem of the plant they inhabit, and use the tiny fibres to build a spongy platform, French researchers say.
People jumped from windows or screamed for rescue from flames as a pre-dawn fire on Friday roared through a Paris hotel used by local government to house needy African families, killing at least 20 people, half of them children. More than 50 people were injured, 11 seriously, in the blaze that was thought to have started in a first-floor breakfast room of the one-star Paris Opera hotel.
Sometimes, goes the old joke, I wake up grumpy. At other times, I let him sleep. Grumpy need never wake up anything less than refreshed, thanks to a futuristic alarm clock that monitors sleep patterns and waits for the sleeper to be in the best possible phase before rousing him or her.
Tributes flooded in from around Europe for Monaco’s Prince Rainier III, who died on Wednesday. French President Jacques Chirac hailed the prince’s ”courage and tenacity” in the face of his failing health. In a message of condolence to Rainier’s successor, Prince Albert, Chirac praised Rainier for helping to modernise once-sleepy Monaco.