FRENCH OPEN — The subway was stopped, every bar within a mile was closed, and most of Paris was asleep, but Novak Djokovic was still playing tennis.
It wasn’t of his own volition: At the French Open on Saturday, Djokovic didn’t even get on court until just after 10:30 p.m., before Lorenzo Musetti produced his best performance in years to take Djokovic to five sets.
The pair were on court for a total of four hours and 29 minutes, finishing at 3:07 a.m. The world number one emerged victorious, but admitted he was exhausted.
“You have to replace all the young genes and try to recover as quickly as possible,” Djokovic said.
The 37-year-old Serb had Sunday off and wasn’t even scheduled to train the day before his fourth-round match against Francisco Cernudolo, but that one day of rest likely won’t be enough.
“He probably goes to bed at about 6 a.m.,” explained doubles player Jamie Murray, a 20-year veteran of the tour who is now tournament director at Queen’s, a claim later echoed by both Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff.
“The next day I’m totally fine, and the next day it’s another fight.
“It will not be easy for Novak to recover. He is not 25 anymore.”
Djokovic tried hard not to criticize tournament organizers for fear of overshadowing his opponent’s efforts.
“I don’t want to get into that,” he said, but then added: “I think some things could have been handled differently, but winning a game at 3:30 in the morning is also great.”
Beautiful perhaps, but not particularly meaningful or interesting: 17-year-old Mila Andreeva beat Victoria Azarenka in a thrilling match that finished at 1 a.m. Wednesday morning and didn’t start until after 10 p.m.
“Usually I’m already in bed by that time, but I was planning to warm up before the match. It was tough,” Andreeva said.
“I was really happy that the crowd stayed until the end because usually when games are played late there aren’t many people and you can’t see anything.”
Even if people do stay, is it really worth the damage to players’ welfare?
“I don’t think that’s healthy at all,” Gauff said. “It might be unfair to the players who have to play late because it messes with their schedule. I’ve been lucky enough not to finish a match that late yet.”
“It’s a complex issue, but I believe it’s in the sport’s best interest, for the health and safety of the players, to ensure that matches don’t end or start after a certain time.”
and I I understand that Swiatek has specifically requested not to play the night matches at Roland Garros because it would disrupt her sleep schedule, and while I’m unlikely to suffer for the schedulers, I also know that it’s beyond my control to politely ask.
“I was always one of the players that said I should start a little earlier,” Swiatek said.
“I don’t know if fans are watching these games when the games finish at 2 or 3 a.m. and they have to go to work the next day.
“It’s not up to us. We have to accept whatever happens to us.”
The current leader is Amazon Prime Video, which has a multimillion-euro deal to broadcast one match during the evening session on Court Philippe Chatrier. The start time was brought forward from 8.45pm to 8.30pm, but was ultimately delayed by more than two hours on Saturday after a rain-affected match was added to the schedule on the main court.
But a growing number of players are speaking out about a schedule that prioritizes the wishes of television networks over the “health and safety” of the players.
The regular tour currently has rules in place to prevent matches from starting after 11pm and limit the number of matches on each court to five per day to ease congestion, and it is hoped that similar rules will be adopted at the Grand Slams.
But such restrictions would not have saved Australia’s Andy Murray and Thanasi Kokkinakis, or Djokovic and Musetti, who finished after 4 a.m. at last year’s Australian Open, the second-slowest finish in Grand Slam history.
The real problem is that tennis matches are getting longer. The ball bounces slower and higher off the court, players are fitter and more accurate, points are longer and so are matches. But the tennis world isn’t doing anything to address these issues. In fact, the consensus in the Australian Open locker room was that the latest generation of balls is even slower in the air and more susceptible to weather conditions.
French Open organizers didn’t run the tournament perfectly, but you can’t really blame them for the weather, which has a knock-on effect on how long each match takes.
Aside from rain delays (which this year saw the unveiling of a second retractable roof to mitigate the effects of rain), when the action actually gets underway, the conditions are cold and damp.
“It was incredibly slow,” British doubles player Henry Patten said after he and partner Hari Heliovaara won the tournament, beating Luke Johnson and Skander Mansouri in the second round.
“Both myself and Harry were surprised at how slow Skander’s serve was, we were both shocked because his serve is always so powerful.
“It was difficult. I picked up a lot of clay on the ball, and it became even heavier than it already was.”
In these situations, it becomes difficult to hold serve, hit winners, and pretty much anything that speeds up the match.
“It was so muddy, the conditions were so bad, it was so cold, the ball just wasn’t going anywhere,” Djokovic agreed.
“I’m not getting a lot of free points on my serve, so I’ve got to take every single point tonight. So [it went on so long]”I really pushed myself to my physical limits to win this match.”
Four years ago, Rafael Nadal spoke of the cold even being dangerous after finishing in the latest time on record, at 1:26 a.m. That year’s tournament was also played in October because of the coronavirus pandemic, making the situation worse.
To players’ dissatisfaction, some concessions have been made: play at the Chatrier will start an hour earlier, at 11 a.m., in the second week, although organizers insist that this was the plan from the beginning, and perhaps in future they will extend the first hour of public play, with the main courts cleared, to the first week as well.
And you have to have some sympathy for the tournament organizers, considering what happened on Sunday after Saturday’s extended schedule — Swiatek, Gauff and Carlos Alcaraz lost just 10 games between them and the day session ended by 4:30 p.m. — so much so that they had to add in a mixed doubles match to fill the schedule.
But that’s probably better than teenager Andreeva’s terse verdict about night tennis: “It’s so depressing, no one is watching and it’s cold.”
