Serena Williams Is Out of French Open With Injury
PARIS — After a resurgent first week at the French Open, Serena Williams was stopped short on Monday — not by her would-be opponent, Maria Sharapova, but by an injury to her right pectoral muscle that forced her to withdraw shortly before their fourth-round match was set to begin.
“Right now I can’t actually serve,” said Williams, 36, as she announced her withdrawal in an overstuffed interview room at Roland Garros. “It’s kind of hard to play when I can’t physically serve.”
This is the first time Williams has withdrawn in the midst of a Grand Slam tournament, although she did retire midmatch in the third round of Wimbledon in 1998 against Virginia Ruano Pascual after injuring her left leg in a fall.
And it is the latest setback in her comeback after giving birth to her daughter, Olympia, last September.
“I’m beyond disappointed,” Williams said. “You know, I gave up so much, from time with my daughter to time with my family. I put everything on the court, you know. All for this moment. So it’s really difficult to be in this situation, but I always, for now in my life, I just always try to think positive and just think of the bigger picture and hopefully the next events and the rest of the year.”
After losing in the first round of the Miami Open to Naomi Osaka in March, she did not play on tour for nearly two months, choosing to focus on improving her fitness and honing her game at her coach Patrick Mouratoglou’s academy near Nice, France.
She played no clay-court warm-up tournaments before the French Open and arrived here ranked 453rd and unseeded. But she quickly began hitting high notes once the tournament began, winning three rounds and defeating two seeded players — No. 17 Ash Barty and No. 11 Julia Görges — to set up her latest duel with Sharapova, whom she has defeated 18 times in a row.
But Williams said she began feeling pain her pectoral muscle during her third-round victory over Görges on Saturday. She still decided to play doubles on Sunday night with her sister Venus, a match they lost in three sets.
“In my doubles yesterday, I tried a lot of different tapings, and I tried lots of different types of support to see how it would feel under match circumstance,” Williams said. “It didn’t really get a lot better.”
Numerous coaches questioned whether it was a good idea for Serena Williams to play doubles as well as singles here.
But Serena Williams insisted that she needed the match play after her extended break from competition, and that Sunday’s match was important as she was dealing with the effects of a new injury.
“I really felt like I needed to because I’m never going to know how I feel under match play if I didn’t have that match,” said Williams. She said she wanted to try different taping combinations to see what might work best in her singles match with Sharapova.
But that match, which would have been their first since an Australian Open quarterfinal in 2016, was not to be.
“I think it does change the tournament, because she’s a phenomenon, Serena Williams,” said Philippe Dehaes, the coach of Daria Kasatkina, the 21-year-old Russian who is into the quarterfinals after ousting second-seeded Caroline Wozniacki on Monday. “When Serena comes back, everybody wants to see her. It’s a bit like taking Nadal out of the tournament, or taking Messi out of Barcelona or Ronaldo out of Real Madrid. It’s sad because this match with Sharapova felt like a final.
“But it does open up an opportunity for Sharapova, who is now very dangerous.”
Sharapova’s team, including her agent Max Eisenbud, were in the players lounge leading to Roland Garros’s main Chatrier stadium when Williams walked into her news conference.
Sharapova she will have to wait for a chance to stop her losing streak against Williams, which dates back to 2004. She has won one set against Williams in the last 10 years and holds a 2-19 record overall.
But Sharapova, seeded No. 28, has been in sparkling form this year at Roland Garros, where she has won two of her five Grand Slam singles titles.
She is now back into the quarterfinals, where she will face the winner of Monday’s fourth-round match between No. 3 seed Garbiñe Muguruza, the 2016 French Open champion, and the unseeded Lesia Tsurenko.
This is Sharapova’s first appearance at the French Open since 2015 because of her 15-month suspension for violating antidoping rules by using the banned substance meldonium. She returned to the circuit in April 2017 but was not granted a wild card into last year’s tournament by the French Open organizers.
Sharapova, 31, has struggled with injuries as she has returned to competition, but is back in the top 30 after changing her support team: rehiring her former coach Thomas Hogstedt and hiring a new physiotherapist who has changed many of her routines.
Williams said she would undergo a magnetic resonance imaging exam on Tuesday in Paris to learn more about her injury.
“There is a lot of theories,” she said. “I have never had this before. So that’s one of the things I was telling my team. I was like: ‘I never felt this before in my life. Like, this is so painful.’ So I don’t really know how to manage it yet. Sadly, when you do have an injury that you have had before you can kind of manage it. I have pretty much had every injury in my book.”
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