It’s one of the cruelest aspects of professional sports: On some days, the nature of an event simply won’t allow the winner to gain a deserved amount of praise. Such was the scene in Paris on another disappointing final Saturday at the French Open.

Every year, the occasion of the women’s singles final at Court Philippe Chatrier offers the promise of a compelling duel on red dirt. Every year, however, the final two females at the French Open can’t seem to produce a riveting match. The last time a women’s final went three sets at Roland Garros was 2001, so when Dinara Safina and Svetlana Kuznetsova took the court on a gray, damp afternoon, the French Tennis Federation and women’s tennis fans were silently and anxiously hoping that an all-Russian affair would produce terrific ballstriking and world-class competition. Safina and Kuznetsova have known each other and played each other since their pre-teen years, so the presence of personal familiarity had a chance of relaxing both 23-year-olds as they tried to chase away haunting memories of past Grand Slam finals.

Safina struggled with the spotlight in the 2008 French final against Ana Ivanovic, and then failed to show up for the 2009 Australian Open final against Serena Williams. Kuznetsova won the 2004 U.S. Open as a teenager too young to truly understand the pressure of the moment, but in her subsequent trips to slam finals, the Kooze crumbled twice against Justine Henin, at the 2006 French and the 2007 U.S. Open. Perhaps a meeting of two fragile psyches, on the same court in the same stadium at the same time, would paradoxically create calm and level-headed lashing of the tennis ball, and serve up the 3-set spectacular that would revive the French Open’s women’s tournament. On a day when a few hundred box seats remained empty at Court Chatrier, it was clear that another women’s singles final was not viewed with a lot of confidence by the bigwigs in Paris. The temperamental Safina and the brittle Kuznetsova had a lot to prove when they took to the terre battue one last time in 2009, before the grass-court rush to Wimbledon and the summer hardcourt season to follow.

After just 74 minutes of agonizing action, it was sadly but undeniably apparent that women’s tennis had not overcome its inability to soar at the slams.

In a match defined more by the meltdown of the loser than by the steady poise of the winner, the seventh-seeded Kuznetsova won her first French title, and her second major crown overall, by whipping a sad and sickened Safina, 6-4, 6-2. Kuznetsova deserves an tremendous amount of fresh respect for breaking through on terre battue for the first time, but the hard-to-ignore reality of this women’s singles final is that it will be remembered for the way in which Safina lost it: badly.

The problem wasn’t Safina’s inability to compete, but her lack of confidence-fueled concentration. The top seed at this tournament, Safina acted like the No. 1 player in the world through her first six matches. Not quite at her very best but always sharp when she needed to be, Safina held off worthy challenges from Victoria Azarenka in the quarterfinals and Dominika Cibulkova in the semifinals. As she strode into Chatrier for a date with redemption, Safina–who had lost just one match earlier in the claycourt season (to Kuznetsova in Stuttgart a month ago), seemed ready to have the right answers this time around. she didn’t need to be perfect, but many observers expected Safina to handle her nerves better in 2009.

Instead, an all-too-familiar train wreck unfolded yet again for the woman who owns a top ranking, but will enter Wimbledon without a slam title to her name. Down 5-3 in the first set, Safina broke at love to get back on serve at 4-5. Just when she had attained a positive turning point, however, Safina tightened up from the backcourt and was broken for the set at 15. She wasn’t blown off the court, but Safina had nevertheless failed to pounce at the business end of a set. After hanging in at 2-all through the first four games of the second set, Safina had seemingly settled into a better groove, but once more, women’s tennis’s No. 1 player was felled by her number one problem: her nerves.

In the 2-all game of the second set, Kuznetsova lost her first two service points to give Safina a love-30 opening. At that very moment, the top seed lost the plot. Jerking her forehand wide and shanking service returns, Safina donated three of the next four points to give Kuznetsova a hold. Over the next three games, the errors continued to tumble from Safina’s racket, with Kuznetsova merely staying out of the way and allowing her opponent to implode. Things got so bad for Safina at the end of her collapse that after being broken for a 2-4 deficit, she turned away from the court and–on the verge of tears–was seen to have said, “Why am I such a chicken?” No journalist or pundit needed to write the story of Dinara Safina’s agonizingly painful disintegration on one of the biggest stages in all of tennis. Safina wrote the story herself, and it’s a story that will unfornately overshadow anything Kuznetsova might have achieved.

Svetlana Kuznetsova has fully defeated her mental enemies, at least for once, at a major. For Dinara Safina–an accomplished player having a generally strong season from week to week and month to month–solving the riddle of Grand Slam finals is the only challenge left in her career. The heart says that Kuznetsova’s breakthrough should be the headline today; the events surrounding another disappointing women’s final in France simply won’t allow that narrative to dominate.

Dinara Safina: Number one in tennis, but number two in singles finals. The third time wasn’t a charm on Saturday in Paris; perhaps slam final number four–whenever it arrives–will give a tearful loser a chance to attain the redemption that so fully eluded her today.

Related Articles