Petit Choux: The Theater

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Previously on The Bagel: All hell broke loose.

• We barely got 24 hours to process the Jannik Sinner exit when Novak Djokovic and Joao Fonseca proceeded to take the court with a weighty amount of narrative on their shoulders, and casually put on one of – the? – matches of the year. I didn’t even get 24 hours to make all my Novak narrative-building jokes – no joke, I had the John Wick 4 staircase scene already set in a browser tab, which I planned to unleash had he won next Sunday – before unc played the longest match of his Roland Garros career at a startlingly good level only to get out-youthed, out-couraged, out-hit by the 19-year-old’s arm cannon, losing 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-5 in 4 hours and 49 minutes.

• Love Tumaini Carayol’s lead in The Guardian:

As Novak Djokovic limped back to his chair four hours into a tennis match that had descended into hell, the 24-times grand slam winner did not have much more to give. A two-set lead had unravelled and his 39-year-old body had hit a wall against a shining opponent 20 years his junior. Having reached the umpire’s chair, Djokovic vomited into the red dirt.

Still, nobody has mastered the art of finding victory from a miserable position quite like Djokovic, so everybody inside Court Philippe-Chatrier knew he could always conjure a path through.

It took the most courageous, headstrong performance from João Fonseca to refuse his legendary opponent a way back. The 19-year-old Brazilian held on for a career-defining victory, 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-5, after 4hr 53min.

[PLEASE IMAGINE THAT I HAVE EMBEDDED A WONDROUS AND BEAUTIFUL EIGHT MINUTE HIGHLIGHT REEL FROM ROLAND GARROS THAT IS NOT GEOBLOCKED. IMAGINE IT, BECAUSE IT DOES NOT EXIST.]

• D’arcy Maine has a great breakdown of how that five-hour thriller went down. And how unlikely it seemed, even to its own participants. (ESPN)

Entering the match, Djokovic had a staggering 288-1 record at majors after winning the first two sets. He had been taken to a fifth set on just six occasions and the only loss was to Jurgen Melzer at Roland Garros in the quarterfinals in 2010. Djokovic had also never been beaten by a teenager at a Slam.

Fonseca, conversely, had played only in two matches that went to a fifth set in his career. And, having come through a decider in his second-round match Wednesday after also dropping the first two sets, he was looking to become the first teenager in nearly 40 years to win multiple matches after being down 0-2.

But while other players have spoken about Djokovic's aura and how difficult it can be to play him, Fonseca was not intimidated down the stretch. It was his first time playing him, and it was Fonseca's debut on Philippe-Chatrier and its 15,000-seat capacity, but he was unfazed. With his back against the wall entering the third set, he raised his level – breaking Djokovic in his first service game – and continued to fight for every point.

"I was just trying to hit the ball as fast [as] I could," he said during his on-court interview.

Djokovic added that he had his chances to win, specifically with multiple break points while leading 4-3 in the fourth set and later with a chance to take a 4-1 edge on serve in the decider. But he said he couldn't find a way. Instead, he just ran out of gas.

"When I look back [on] important moments, could I have done something different? You know, you can always say yes, but you just have to say, 'Well done,' and congratulate him," Djokovic said. "Hats off. He just played lights-out tennis. Every time there was a decisive moment, he went for it."

• Here’s how Matt Futterman at The Athletic saw Djokovic’s missed opportunity.

No one can predict the future. Stranger things may yet happen. Still, what looked like Djokovic’s best opportunity to claim yet another crowning achievement has evaporated.

“It would be nice if it was best-of-three, but it’s not,” Djokovic said. “I ran out of gas."

He didn’t want to talk about what had drifted out of his grasp, stopping any discussion of Sinner and Alcaraz no longer being around to cause him any trouble, and the opportunity that everyone knew was there for him.

“I don’t care,” he said when asked about the impact of Sinner’s loss on his mindset. “I’ll stop you right there. No. Just lost third round. Let’s just talk about something else.”

• Novak said he wasn’t sure if he was going to play Roland-Garros again:

Q.  Novak, will we see you back at Roland Garros next year

NOVAK DJOKOVIC: I don't know.

Q.  Would it be okay if that was your last match to play against a player like that?

NOVAK DJOKOVIC: I don't know.

• Per the ATP, history has been made at Roland Garros 2026:

Following Novak Djokovic's loss to Joao Fonseca Friday in Paris, no major champions are in the fourth round at the clay-court major. It is the first time in the Open Era that no Grand Slam men’s singles champions have made the Round of 16 at a major.

• Adolfo Daniel Vallejo is set for a big fine from Roland Garros for saying what he said, which I was hoping to ignore because who the hell cares what this guy said, but then it got picked up and now it’s a story. (The Guardian)
• Good on the FFT and RG for not throwing the umpire under the bus, like so many other tournaments have done in the past.

• Is there irony given Roland Garros’ past and present treatment of the women of the WTA? Sure. But you take the dubs where you can.
• Unrelated but related, here’s Vallejo in January’s 1-Point Slam:

• The RG comms office was busy on Friday. In addition to Vallejo’s nonsense, Zeynap Sonmez became the latest victim of the Lacoste advertising boards at the back of the court, which have been a player hazard for years now. Sonmez ran into one during her doubles match and had to retire due to injury. This came less than 24 hours after Katie Boulter collided with one in her singles match against Anastasia Potapova. Boulter avoided injury. (The Guardian)

• In response, Roland Garros issued this release:

• While Joao and Novak were going toe-to-toe on Chatrier, Casper Ruud and Tommy Paul were grinding it out on Lenglen, and boy was it a doozy. Casper came from two sets to love down and saved two match points to edge Tommy 4-6, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(4), 7-5. The match lasted 4 hours and 43 minutes. And with that, Casper, who somehow survived that first-round match when he looked like he would heat-stroke out, is now into the Fourth Round to play Fonseca. (ATP)

• Here’s the Round of 16 for the men’s bottom half:

[26] Mensik vs. [11] Rublev
[15] Ruud vs. [28] Fonseca
[27] Jodar vs. Carreno Busta
De Jong vs. [2] Zverev

• While the men were being dramatic – fork found in kitchen – the women were, for the most part, chalk. Sorana Cirstea became the oldest player to double-bagel someone at a Slam. Jil Teichmann took advantage of a seemingly hobbled Karolina Muchova. And holy cow, what are you doing in the Round of 16 for the first time, Lefty???
• Here’s the Round of 16 for the bottom half:

[7] Svitolina vs. [11] Bencic
[15] Kostyuk vs. [3] Swiatek
[8] Andreeva vs. Teichmann
[18] Cirstea vs. [Q] Wang Xiyu

WTA Backspin by Todd Spiker: RG.6- A Passage to Inevitability

A Passage to Inevitability

As she seeks what would be her sixth Top 10 win this season (which would set a new career high for a full season just half-way through the '26 schedule), Kostyuk has never quite had such a monumental moment staring back at her. Not on a tennis court, at least. If she proves she can take out Swiatek in Paris, then *she* becomes the obstacle for the rest of the field to have to deal with.

The time may *not* be right for Kostyuk's official transition into a "leading role," but her "lead character energy" has also probably never been as strong as it is right now. In full stride on the court, and in a righteous mood off it, the Ukrainian now has the chance to claim a plot of land – as well as the ongoing plot of a champion's journey – as her own.

• Hailey Baptiste has posted: “The most heartbreaking end to the best season of my life."

• Alex De Minaur bageled Jakub Mensik. Then he fell apart. And now he’s looking for answers. Never heard Demon sound this despondent. Good stuff from Courtney Walsh, a.k.a., the superior Courtney. (Fox AU)

While de Minaur remains in the top 10 ahead of the grass court swing, he said late on Friday night in Paris that he will discuss the extended slump with his team in coming days to identify a reset, which could include the prospect of a brief break

“I’m in a weird stage at the moment where I have put in a lot and ... recently I haven’t felt like I’ve gotten a lot back,” he said.

“So (I’m) trying to find that balance of whether it’s again you just put your head down (and) get back to work, (because) there is no other way forward than to go through it, right? That’s kind of the mentality I have had my whole career.

“But I feel like it’s been a long couple of years of that type of mentality. Maybe that’s taking a little bit of a toll on me right now. I don’t know. I really don’t know what the solution is.

“(Is it) to go out and try to play matches and get my confidence back and get wins under the belt and just go that way? Or (is it) the opposite, to just say, ‘Hey, let’s forget about tennis for a little while. Let’s make sure I come back missing it and get back on the horse’. I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to the team and kind of decide in the coming days.”

• Andrey Rublev is looking good in Paris. Both tennistically and follically:

Q.  I want to ask, despite all the sweat and the clay and also the stress on court, how do you manage to make your hair look so good-looking? What is your hair care routine or your secrets?

ANDREY RUBLEV: No secrets. I guess I was just lucky, and the way I wake up. The way I wake up, the way they are. No, to be honest, of course I'm taking care of my hair.

It's funny, because when I was kind of far away from top 10 and things like that, it was opposite. Can he have a normal haircut? What is this with his hair? He looks like a monkey. He have no money to have a haircut?

Then when you start to be a better player, somehow you appears to the top 10, it's, like, Wow, what hair he have, what a style, he's a rock star. I had all my life, this hair. How that opinion change, you know?

• Jil Teichman scored the big upset of the day on the women’s side, beating 10th seed Karolina Muchova 6-1, 7-5. Muchova led the second set 5-1 but took a medical timeout at 5-2 and never really recovered. Teichmann hit a peak at No.21 in 2022 – remember that 2021 Cincinnati final run? — but came into Roland Garros ranked No.170. She had not played a match between September of last year and April of this year. Here’s how she explains her gap:

"I was having a very good season [in 2022]. A lot of things changed since then. Firstly, I was, like, 23, 24. Now I'm 28. In between, yeah, different things happen. I struggled a bit with my body, then with my mind. It's a very intense job, I would say.

I have been doing that since I'm 14 nonstop. Until that moment, I was very, very lucky with my body, just having a few, like, four to six weeks' injuries that, yeah, it's a very positive thing so I could be playing the whole time.

But at the same time, yeah, in every career, things happen on court, off court. Changes with quite a lot of my team, as well as in my personal life things happened.

So at some point things get together and it kind of gets too much. So, yeah, decided last September to take a little break, even though I was, like, top 100. I just needed it, because, you know, I do enjoy tennis a lot. I really do like it.

But I was feeling that I was getting down a road that was not healthy anymore. For me, it was like – as well, with my team, everyone was on board with that. It's just if I wanted to keep playing, I don't know if you say in English, but prolong your career, I needed to take a little break and start again and start from the base.

It's basically what I did since January. I'm working very hard with my team. Started from zero, took my time as well building up. Yeah, here I am (smiling).

• Simon Cambers on the prize money dispute, says the players’ problem is messaging. Which…yep! (First Serve)

The problem for the players is that their messaging is all over the place. While some of them explain that they want to grow the game, with more money needed for lower-ranked players to make a living, others try to compare tennis with the big US sports, "football", basketball, hockey and baseball, where 50 per cent of revenue is given to athletes.

That is an entirely misleading comparison, at best. Athletes in the US are employees of their sports; as such, they are guaranteed big salaries, but don't have control over their image rights. Tennis players are considered independent contractors, earning money from the Tours and majors. It's apples and oranges. Men's No.1 Sinner said recently that players "wouldn't dare" ask for 50 per cent, but others keep raising it, including former stars, like Boris Becker.

• The Rafael Nadal doc has finally dropped on Netflix. Here’s Ava Wallace’s take on it. (The Athletic)

Just when the documentary has shown enough of Nadal’s happy life outside tennis that viewers begin to question why he continues physically torturing himself by playing, Nadal explains.

“For me, it’s simple. I’m exploring my limits,” he says.

Had he not explored everything – the orthotics, the anti-inflammatories, the shots that numbed his foot in his final season – “I probably would have ten fewer Grand Slams,” Nadal says.

“I’m not saying one or two, I’m saying ten or twelve. This is the reality.

After nearly four hours painting Nadal as equal parts humble and tortured, tennis’s great endurance athlete who suffers for the love of the game, the documentary lets viewers in on a secret: Some part of him does care about how the numbers stack up. That does as much humanizing as any insightful scene about his struggles.

• Ok but an Joao Fonseca DO THIS:

• Missed this yesterday: Giri Nathan on Jannik Sinner’s exit. (Defector)

The streak of nine Slams won by Sinner and Alcaraz now ends, albeit in unsatisfying fashion, less due to a challenger's excellence than to medical woes. In the course of writing and promoting a book about these two players, I've had to simplify shaggy storylines into clean talking points. I've had to exaggerate the differences between two players who actually have quite a bit in common, so that a reader or listener can more clearly delineate them. One thing I've said often, lightly eye-rolling at myself, is that Alcaraz is more likely to be undone by his own mind, and Sinner by his own body. But then we witness actual tennis matches that mirror the truisms with eerie clarity. This loss might as well be a caricature of Sinner losing to The Elements while on the doorstep of victory.

• A great point from Andrea Petkovic’s latest newsletter. Who’s gonna shit the bed? (Finite Jest)

What we don’t talk about enough is how easily players can and will hide behind the big superstar favourite. They play in their half of the draw, try to win matches and are left alone for the most part. With Jannik Sinner out, that is not the case anymore. Now, the headlights are bright and shining into everyone else’s eyes. Their form will be dissected and analysed, carefully watched and prodded for any kind of weakness. It’s important to focus on the possibility in this new development of the draw and not contemplate the possibilities you could squander. 

I had a similar situation once in my career and it’s fair to say I failed at mastering it miserably. A big seed fell in my section in Wimbledon and as one of the top seeds I ended up losing my next match to a qualifier because I had looked too far ahead. In my case, it wasn’t arrogance in the way I looked ahead and smelled the opportunity of reaching the Wimbledon quarterfinals for the first time. The glance into the future was rather tinged with fear that I wasn’t able to execute which, of course, came true. Plus, even though it seems like you get a new chance in tennis every week, when a real big fat chance actually presents itself, you actually don’t know whether it is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

• I love you Brian Phillips: The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech. (The Ringer)

Anyway, the pope’s encyclical is an impressive document, and I strongly suggest you read it, or at least read more about it. But it isn’t perfect. I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass. 

Of course, it’s beneath the pope’s dignity to say, “Truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass,” unless maybe he’s talking about Drake LaRoche. It’s definitely not beneath mine. And thus, in a spirit of piety and wise counsel, I do herewith offer the following humble list of the 40 most unbelievably fricking irritating problems in tech. It’s pretty long, but there are probably some annoyances I forgot. I never claimed to be infallible, UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE.

11. For the love of God—ad amorem Dei, as the liturgy would say—please figure out shipping status updates. Congratulations! Your package has shipped. Here’s a tracking code. Oh, clicking the tracking code and going to the shipper’s website suggests your package hasn’t shipped? Well, it has, but here’s the thing—it also hasn’t. Welcome to Schrödinger’s UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it’s being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. I once got a text from UPS saying they’d picked up my package the day after the package showed up on my porch. (This technically makes me immortal.)

Bop of the Day: This has been my Paris anthem so far. I listen to it multiple times a day and it makes me happy every time. I have no idea what she’s saying. Is she happy? Is she sad? Sure.