Casper Ruud overcomes stifling heat and Roman Safiullin in French Open first round

PARIS — A brutally hot first couple of days at the French Open reached their natural conclusion Monday, with Casper Ruud and Roman Safiullin competing in a contest that was more battle of attrition than tennis match.

Ruud, the No. 15 seed and a two-time former finalist at Roland Garros, won the painful and sometimes surreal first-round encounter 6-2, 7-6(5), 5-7, 0-6, 6-2. But that barely begins to tell the story of a match where both players ended up badly physically compromised — Ruud with heatstroke, Safiullin with a stomach issue and hip injury. In a post-match news conference Ruud said that in the fourth set, he had felt “really dizzy and just really tired and walking around like a zombie almost.” His fifth-set revival was like “jump-starting almost a dead body.”

The dramatic conclusion felt a long way off when Ruud went up two sets to love. Though perhaps foreshadowing what was to come, he left the court at the end of a grueling 75-minute second set to change his shoes, which were drenched in sweat. Ruud then had match points up 5-2, and three in a row at 40-0 when he served for the match at 5-3, but he deteriorated physically from there and lost 10 straight games.

He received medical attention for illness after the first and third games of the fourth set. The color had drained from his face, and his energy was visibly fading with the temperature still around 82 degrees as the clock ticked toward 8 p.m. It looked at that point as if Ruud would have no choice but to retire, a moment that must have brought back painful memories of the 2024 French Open, when, weakened by a stomach parasite, he stumbled to a semifinal defeat against Alexander Zverev. Or of last year, when he injured his knee during a second-round loss to Nuno Borges.

Ruud said after the match that he had begun to feel unwell midway through the third set and started to suffer from cramp in his calves. As the games slipped away, he said he drew inspiration from Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz at this year’s Australian Open, both of whom cramped badly against Eliot Spizzirri and Zverev respectively but were able to conserve their energy and eventually rediscover their strength and win.

As Ruud effectively wrote off the fourth set, a turn of events arrived to sum up the bizarre match. Just as it seemed as though he was going to win almost by default, Safiullin, the world No. 141 from Russia, took a medical timeout himself for a hip injury while leading 5-0. As

Then came the turn of events that best summed up the bizarre match, as Safiullin, the world No. 141 from Russia, took a medical timeout for a hip injury while leading 5-0 in the fourth set. While Safiullin lay on a mat to receive treatment, Ruud covered his face with an ice towel in a desperate effort to revive himself.

Safiullin said in a mixed zone interview afterward that while not being able to power on may have cost him, he needed to get treatment for a recurring hip problem. He added that it was getting to the point where “you just survive the points and it’s going already on an automatic level, and you just do the best that you can at that moment.”

Ruud said that because he was two sets to one up, “I allowed myself to kind of lower the intensity a bit to get my pulse and body temperature down as much as possible in the fourth to see if there was any chance to finish in the fifth and have some extra energy. Luckily, that ended up working.”

After the medical timeout, Safiullin picked himself up to polish off a bagel set and force a decider, but he had clearly lost a step, making for a last game of the fourth set that looked more appropriate for a local park than one of the four most prestigious venues in world tennis. Both players left the court ahead of the fifth set, which began more than 16 minutes later.

By then, the question was whether the ill player could beat the injured one?

It turned out that whatever Ruud did to revitalize himself worked, as the power gradually returned to his serve and groundstrokes, while Safiullin gradually succumbed to the punishing conditions. On a day when a ball kid fainted on court and various players wilted in the heat.

For Ruud, a third French Open final remains a possibility. He reached the Italian Open final earlier this month, where he was beaten by Jannik Sinner, and the semifinals of the Geneva Open last week.

“It feels like a mental win,” Ruud said. “At times in the fourth I was thinking, I have to book the flight home tomorrow, and I’ll be watching from home on the sofa the next two weeks. Luckily, that’s not the case.

“Physically, also, I’m proud because I never really gave in. I didn’t give up. Like I said, I’d rather lose (6-0, 6-0 in the last two sets) and be out there and at least try than to retire, but yeah, it didn’t look pretty there in the fourth.”

Ruud is seeded to face Novak Djokovic in the round of 16 and will face another player representing Serbia, world No. 58 Hamad Medjedovic, in Wednesday’s second round.

Click here to read article