Back when Rafael Nadal was winning the French Open year after year, a sunny Paris forecast spelled doom for the rest of the field.
It was hard enough competing with Nadal, but in hot, dry weather, where the ball bounces higher and travels quicker through the court? Everyone else may as well have gone home.
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Conditions matter a great deal at any tennis event and Roland Garros is no exception. Especially given that clay-court tennis continues when there is light rain, so the effect can be especially keenly felt.
At this year’s tournament, the Paris weather has been wet and cold. The rain dampens playing conditions and spirits alike, leaving players a little more tired, a little more tetchy. At times on Tuesday, a day dominated by rain delays, the mood was a bit like a damp summer holiday — with everyone indoors and cabin fever taking over.
Then on Wednesday, all play on outdoor courts was cancelled after another sustained downpour at Roland Garros. Several matches got underway at the normal start time, before being suspended around 40 minutes later.
The players came off. The crowds milled. The rain continued. The entire venue was in a wet, grey freeze-frame, broken only by the signature terracotta orange — not of the courts, but of the tarpaulins protecting them.
“The most important thing is to have a positive mindset throughout the day because it’s very easy to start complaining about the weather, the conditions, everything — but if you start down that rabbit hole, you can probably guarantee you’re not going to play a good level match,” said the Australian 11th seed Alex de Minaur, who played well in the gloom and drizzle to beat America’s Alex Michelsen 6-1, 6-0, 6-2 on the uncovered Court Simonne-Mathieu.
De Minaur even went as far as pretending to himself that he was enjoying the cold and wet. “You’ve got to see the bright side,” he said.
“Even though it’s a little bit fake it until you make it, right? I was telling myself walking into the match that I love these types of conditions, that I wish every day was like this.” De Minaur, who is from Sydney and grew up in Alicante, Spain, is not a very good liar.
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Not everyone could put on that sunny disposition though. One of the consequences of a rainy day such as Tuesday’s is that the schedule gets rejigged and players can be shunted around at late notice. Doubles matches were cancelled and the singles players were spread across the entire complex.
The American No 1 Taylor Fritz was one such player, and he was furious at being told he was due on Court 9 for his match against Argentinian Federico Coria in half-an-hour, having initially been scheduled to follow De Minaur and Michelsen on Mathieu, and so not be on for at least a couple of hours.
“I’m just chilling on the couch in the locker room and I’m under the impression that there is minimum two and a half hours before I play,” he said.
“Then they tell me I’m on in 30 minutes. I said, ‘No chance’. I pushed it to 45 minutes. It’s still so tough to mentally prepare to go on in that short of time when I’ve had it set in my mind it’s going to be a minimum two and a half hours. That was the toughest thing.”
An underprepared Fritz lost the opening set 6-2, before winning comfortably in four. “I wasn’t playing my best (at the start), but I like to get ready, start getting my mind ready.”
Madison Keys, America’s world No 12, had a similar experience as she rushed from the practice court to the match court to face Renata Zarazua on Simonne-Mathieu. “The harder thing is you sit for so many hours and then all of a sudden it’s, like, go, go, go. So as soon as Alex (de Minaur) got on the court before me, they still hadn’t uncovered the practice court. So I was sitting there wondering, ‘Am I going to get on to practise?’.”
“Then we finally did, and we got to hit for 15 minutes. Then I ran back to the locker room to change. It’s not a typical routine, and I think we all get so sucked into wanting our days to be planned. A day like today is a little bit unnerving sometimes.”
It was a day for adapting and making the best of tricky situations. Two years ago, Nadal and Novak Djokovic played a late-night epic of a quarter-final in conditions that had spectators shivering and wearing blankets.
Why does weather make such a difference to tennis at Roland Garros? And how can players adjust to try and cope?
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This being tennis, there are a few different tiers to how the players experienced today.
In the first arrondissement — we’re in Paris, after all — were the players on Court Phillipe-Chatrier and Court Suzanne Lenglen. They have roofs. They play all day, even as the rain pours.
The hoi polloi were those like De Minaur, Keys and Fritz, who were on the outside courts and so spent hours of the day trying to stay loose while waiting for the rain to stop.
The courts with roofs play differently to the outside courts and even between Chatrier and Lenglen, there are differences. In the latter, more air gets in through the new roof and so it feels cooler than on Chatrier, where the humidity rises once it becomes an indoor court.
But whatever the court, there are consistent effects caused by the wet and cold. The main effect of the cold weather is on the ball, which gets wetter and heavier in these conditions. A saturated tennis ball is said to be about one per cent heavier than a dry one, and a wet ball picks up more dust from the clay, which adds further weight.
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Warmer temperatures also increase the speed and kinetic energy of the molecules inside the ball. When a ball hits the ground, it compresses, before springing back to its full size. The faster those molecules move, the more kinetic energy and bounce they produce.
On Tuesday, this played out in various ways. The No 13 seed Holger Rune talked about the “very low bounce” of the balls during his win against Dan Evans, and pretty much everyone mentioned how slow it was and how heavy the balls felt. “It’s totally different from last year,” said Tomas Martin Etcheverry after beating the Frenchman Arthur Cazaux on Lenglen. Rune agreed. A side-effect of the rain for the Etcheverry match against Cazaux was that the roof being on made the raucous home support even louder, to the extent that it felt as if they manifested some of the Frenchman’s ultimately pyrrhic breaks of serve all by themselves.
Part of the trick is to accept the changes, rather than fighting them with the ego of one’s own gamestyle.
“You have to mentally prepare that you won’t maybe hit as many winners, and also that the rallies might be a bit longer, because the ball doesn’t travel as far or fast through the air as on a normal sunny day,” said two-time finalist Casper Ruud, who beat Felipe Meligeni Alves in straight sets. It’s maybe easier for Ruud to take this position — his heavy topspin still works well in slower conditions, and they make it harder for rivals with flatter games to hit through him. Clay already readjusts style matchups to read differently on the ‘terre battue’ than they might on paper; rainy conditions readjust them again.
“It suited my game quite well today,” he said. “You just have to prepare for a bit longer rallies, and the balls will get a little bigger and heavier. It’s not going to be easy to hit clean winners and fast points.”
His opponent Alves admitted that he’d been sucked into doing the opposite: “You feel like you have to hit shots that bit harder.”
The No 2 seed Aryna Sabalenka followed Ruud and Alves onto Chatrier and said something similar to the Norwegian after her straightforward straight-sets win over Erika Andreeva.
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“In these conditions, I just prepare myself for long rallies,” she said.
“I’m not trying to hit bigger — if you do, you will hit more unforced errors. So I prepare myself mentally for longer points and accept that it’ll take more shots to win the rallies.”
Keys said: “Sometimes you have to add a little bit more height over the net because the ball is not going to shoot through the court as much, but it’s more about understanding that today is heavier, so a few balls might come back.
“You might not get as many easy balls off of your first serve. It’s about changing the expectation of what’s going to happen, but not trying to deviate from my game too much.”
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Daria Kasatkina, the Russian No 10 seed, added: “You’re going to lose some points with mistakes because it’s going to be longer rallies. And you’re going to get less points with the serve.”
Players also have to adjust their preparation, knowing they will most likely be in for an even more gruelling match — on what’s already the most demanding surface. “It’s going to be a more physical match,” said Etcheverry, one of the players who enjoyed the colder conditions — thanks in part to playing in frigid temperatures during the Buenos Aires winter growing up. “You have to prepare and try to recover well because you have to be strong to hit the heavier ball.”
Different players made different tactical adjustments to compensate for the heavier conditions. For De Minaur, not one of the tour’s biggest hitters, it was about “thinking outside the box”. It was also about wearing a thermal undershirt to stay warm.
“It (the weather) alters the tactics big-time,” de Minaur said. “The conditions are slower. So someone stronger can still hit through these conditions and even have a bit more control, but for someone that doesn’t have as much firepower, it creates a different style of tennis. You have to be more patient.
“It’s a completely different match than if it was sunny because I feel like I can probably hit through him (Michelsen) a lot more. I did what I needed to do to get the win today. I was ready for a battle in the cold and rain.”
For Fritz, it’s the heaviness of the ball being used at the French Open that meant the biggest adjustments for him.
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“These balls are very, very, heavy and they’re soft,” he said. “So when they hit the court they don’t really move. They slow down a lot.
“All the stuff that’s been working for me the whole clay court season isn’t really working (with these balls).
“I’ve been loving playing my forehand really high and heavy. Now I do that with these balls and the ball sits there for people to attack, it’s not heavy,” he said.
“Adjustments I made today were trying to step in and flatten the ball way more, especially off my forehand, which I’ve barely done in like a month and a half, because I’ve just been playing everything spinny and heavy, and it’s been working great.
“These conditions, these balls… if you don’t have one of the heaviest, highest RPM (revolutions per minute) balls on tour, it doesn’t actually go anywhere. You just have to stand closer and hit through way more. I’m playing it a bit less like a clay court and more like a hard court, because all the clay-court style tennis I’ve been doing doesn’t work for me with these balls.”
All this is coming from players who don’t exactly thrive on clay anyway, but even the king of the surface thinks the same thing. During that cold, wet 2022 tournament, Nadal gave his opinion.
“I don’t like to play on clay during the night, because the humidity is higher, the ball is slower, and there can be very heavy conditions especially when it’s cold.
“That makes a big difference between the way tennis is played on clay during the night and during the day,” he said.
The difference between rainy and sunny conditions are night-and-day themselves. This makes it easy to wonder how different his match against Alexander Zverev on Monday might have been had it been warm, dry, and in open air, rather than playing out under the Chatrier roof and the “English weather”, as one local spectator put it on Tuesday lunchtime as the rain continued to fall.
The rest of the tournament is forecast to bring more rain and cold. The players will have their thermals and their “droppys” ready to go.
(Top photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)
