Less than three years ago, the career arc of Jelena Jankovic appeared to be headed for the highest heavens. After a miserable Monday in Paris, a struggling Serbian finds herself at a crossroads, her plans for Roland Garros reduced to rubble.

Jankovic, the No. 5 seed at the French Open, lost her women’s singles fourth-round match to unseeded Sorana Cirstea. The 41st-ranked Romanian shrugged off first-set jitters and late-match pressure to oust Jankovic, 3-6, 6-0, 9-7, in 2 hours and 44 minutes on Court Suzanne Lenglen. The win sends Cirstea to Wednesday’s quarterfinals against 30th-seeded Samantha Stosur of Australia.

Cirstea–playing in only her second French Open at the tender age of 19–should be commended for responding so decisively to a one-set deficit. Jankovic had cruised through her first three matches in Paris, so when the Serbian standout gained the early upper hand, it was hard to see how this young and untested Romanian would get off the deck and create a third set, much less win a match. But after nearly three hours of persistent punching in the gathering evening shadows, it was the top 5 mainstay, not the plucky underdog, who sagged and relented in the thick of the fight.

Jankovic is a defense-first player, but the woman who has reached the semifinals at Roland Garros in each of the past two years most certainly possesses the ability to hit freely, particularly with a lethal two-handed backhand. Yet, for all the firepower she can at times display, Jankovic remained passive in this match, much as her countryman, Novak Djokovic, did in his Saturday setback against Germany’s Philipp Kohlschreiber. Due to Jankovic’s lack of a more attack-based game, the match centered around Cirstea’s ability to keep her winner-error ratio appreciably even. Mistakes would be made in the 19-year-old’s first-ever foray to the fourth round of a major tournament; as long as enough winners lined the score sheet as well, the Romanian would have a chance to create even more chaos in a wide-open women’s tournament.

As the hour grew late on French soil, Cirstea showed she had the toughness to outlast a more accomplished adversary.

On and on these women played, as the third set–at 89 minutes–lasted longer than the first two sets combined (75). Toiling well into the evening, Cirstea actually faltered first by losing serve at 5-all and giving Jankovic a chance to serve for the match at 6-5. Due to her big-match experience and her position in the upper tier of the WTA Tour, Jankovic had to expect to win against an opponent who was participating in only the sixth major tournament of her career.

Experience, though, can be overrated, on both sides of a divide. Cirstea revealed unseen moxie that had not emerged in previous Grand Slam tournaments. Showing all the composure of a veteran, the Romanian broke for 6-all. Moments later, at 8-7, the tenacious teenager took away Jankovic’s serve a second time to advance to the quarterfinals against an entirely beatable opponent ranked outside the top 25. This result surely can’t come close to matching the shock value of Rafael Nadal’s loss to Robin Soderling, but in its own way, this rousing round of 16 collision rates as a very big story in the world of big-time tennis. The rise of Cirstea is a pleasant development in the sport, but it’s the pronounced decline of Jankovic that demands the attention of the tennis community.

In September of 2006, Jankovic–then only 21, and with better days ahead of her–lost her cool in the second set of a U.S. Open semifinal match she led against Justine Henin (then, Justine Henin-Hardenne). A fierce exchange with the chair umpire over a disputed line call hijacked Jankovic’s concentration, and an hour later, the Serb had been dismissed by Henin-Hardenne in three sets. The loss was painful, but there was a strong sense that the moment would be a forward catapult to a better career, and not a debilitating defeat that would sabotage Jankovic’s progression on the tour.

In 2008, that line of analysis was affirmed, as Jankovic reached the semis or better at three of the year’s four major tournaments. Briefly attaining the No. 1 ranking in the world, Jankovic learned from her mistakes instead of repeating them. As a result, a merely “dangerous” player became a consistently productive player who was expected to make deep runs at the year’s biggest events. Jelena Jankovic had turned the corner when 2008 came to a close.

The 2009 tennis season has quickly and severely wiped away such an assessment. In five months–culminating with this loss to Cirstea–Jankovic has suddenly become a lot more mortal, and a lot less convincing. After crashing out of this year’s Australian Open in the fourth round against Marion Bartoli–a player bereft of considerable accomplishments–Jankovic has now bowed out of the fourth round again in Roland Garros, on what is considered her best surface. Losing to a younger, lower-ranked, less-experienced opponent on red clay, after having a chance to serve for a spot in the French Open quarterfinals, represents a massive psychic shock… not just for Jankovic herself, but for women’s tennis pundits who couldn’t have predicted such a precipitous decline in such a short period of time.

The hard but undeniable truth of the matter is that Jelena Jankovic–at least for the moment–can’t be counted on to play more than 8 or 9 days at a major championship. The elite performers in this sport spend a full two weeks at the slams. Jankovic has fallen from that group, and with pronounced velocity.

A career stands at a crossroads. Only Jelena Jankovic can decide which way she wants to go from here.

Related Articles