Harried Halep admits she ‘lost it’ in panic attack
Two-time Grand Slam champion Simona Halep said she had a panic attack while leading her secondround match that she eventually lost at the French Open yesterday.
The 2018 Roland Garros winner said she “lost it” and couldn’t regain focus while playing 19-year-old Chinese Qinwen Zheng, who won 2-6,
6-2, 6-1 at Court Simonne-Mathieu. “I had a break in the second set, but then something happened. I just lost it,” the 30-year-old Romanian said in her post-match press conference. “It was just a panic attack. It happened. I didn’t know how to handle it because I don’t have it often.”
Halep, the 2019 Wimbledon champion, had already amassed
20 wins this season and had beaten
74th-ranked Zheng in January. Halep said she likely put too much pressure on herself.
“After the match was pretty tough. But now, I’m good. I’m recovered and I will learn from this episode.”
Halep’s loss is one of several early upsets which offer a rare opportunity for unheralded winners to enjoy the spotlight.
For the first time in nearly half a century, just three of the top 10 seeds in the women’s draw have made it to the round of 32.
So meet Leolia Jeanjean: age 26, from Montpellier, France, ranked
227th, a wild-card entry after never before being a Slam participant.
Earmarked for greatness before she was even a teenager, Jeanjean suffered a serious knee and gave the game away for a couple of years
before playing at American colleges. An unbeaten record at her second college in Florida encouraged her to turn professional.
Good choice for Jeanjean. Bad one for her foes so far at Roland Garros, including Karolina Pliskova, a two-time major finalist and the No 8 seed, who
was unable to offer much resistance yesterday and was beaten 6-2, 6-2 by Jeanjean in the second round.
“I don’t have an explanation. I don’t even realise what’s happening,” Jeanjean said. “It’s my first Grand Slam. I thought I would have lost in the first round in two sets — and I found myself beating a top-10 player. So, honestly, I have nothing else to say. I don’t really know how it’s possible.”
Danielle Collins, the Australian Open runner-up in January, departed, too, eliminated by 50thranked Shelby Rogers 6-4, 6-3 in a match-up between Americans.
The previous time three or fewer top-10 women’s seeds got to the French Open’s round of 32 was in
1976; in those days, only eight players were seeded to begin with in a field of
64, half today’s tournament size. The remaining trio, all in the top half of the bracket, won secondround matches yesterday: No 1 Iga Swiatek ran her winning streak to
30 matches, the longest in women’s tennis since Serena Williams had a
34-match run in 2013, by overwhelming Alison Riske 6-0, 6-2; No 3 Paula Badosa recovered from a mid-match lapse to get past Kaja Juvan 7-5, 3-6,
6-2; and No 7 Aryna Sabalenka defeated Madison Brengle 6-1, 6-3.
In contrast, all 12 of the highest men’s seeds have advanced to the third round, the first time that’s happened at the French Open since 2009.
Stefanos Tsitsipas, the runner-up to Novak Djokovic at Roland Garros last year, saved four set points after falling behind 6-2 in the last tiebreaker before putting away 134thranked qualifier Zdenek Kolar 6-3, 7-6 (8), 6-7 (3), 7-6 (6) in a little over four hours.
Kolar, of the Czech Republic, never had won a tour-level match until this week, but his relentless ball-tracking left Tsitsipas acknowledging at the end: “He drove me crazy. Yeah, it was really frustrating.”