French Open recap: Crowd seizes its moment during Mirra Andreeva vs. Lois Boisson

New York Times

5 days ago

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Welcome to the French Open briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.
On day 11, Mirra Andreeva showed how far she has come by cracking under pressure, Jessica Pegula reminded the world of the impact of angry bettors on tennis players and Madison Keys made plans for grass — already.
It wasn't long ago that Mirra Andreeva was pretty regularly letting her emotions get the better of her tennis.
Two years ago, against Coco Gauff, Andreeva swatted a ball into the crowd on Court Suzanne-Lenglen. She was lucky it didn't connect with a fan and get her disqualified.
A month later, a chair umpire ruled that she had thrown her racket during the final moments of her match against Madison Keys at Wimbledon. She maintained that it slipped from her hand, but Wimbledon is famously protective of its grass. The umpire docked her a point, which gave Keys match point. Andreeva lost the match and received an £8,000 fine.
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Andreeva, still just 18, rarely does that sort of stuff anymore. Changing her mentality, with the help of her coach, Conchita Martinez, has helped turn her into a top-10 player and a two-time WTA 1,000 champion. But 15,000 screaming fans trying to fry a player's brain can make them go a bit mad, whatever their age. That's what Andreeva had to face against Loïs Boisson, the French wild card, for a place in the French Open semifinals.
Andreeva lost leads in both sets. She lost a set point at 5-3 in the first one. While the second set was getting away from her, she caught a ball and swatted it at the roof. Having kept the crowd at bay for the entire match by refusing to show much emotion, she gave them the bait they had been looking for. Boos and whistles echoed around the stadium in a din designed to put her off her game.
She started battling the people in her box, including her mother and Martinez, the coach she reveres.
The pressure to win and the pressure from the crowd combined to overwhelm her, she said.
'I will learn from this,' she said. 'I will do everything that I can to maybe not do it the next time I play a big match like this.'
As for the exchange with her box, which saw her gesturing at them to leave at one point, Andreeva said it grew out of frustration when she looked for some guidance after mistakes, as though it was their fault, not hers.
'Today was one of those days when it's just a bit harder to deal with everything that's going on in the court,' she said.
Matt Futterman
With grim predictability, Jessica Pegula's shock defeat to Boisson in the French Open fourth round led to the American receiving a torrent of social media abuse. The vast majority of the online abuse tennis players receive tends to come from bettors, and upsets — especially one involving a rankings gap of 358 places — provoke even more vitriol.
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Pegula, the American world No. 3, shared some of the worst examples she received after the Boisson match on her Instagram story, and wrote: 'These bettors are insane and delusional.'
'I don't allow DMs, and try to remember when to shut my comments off during tournament weeks, but they always find a way to my timeline. This stuff has never really bothered me much, but does any other sport deal with this to our level? I'd love to know because it seems to be predominantly tennis? It's so disturbing.'
'Every person on tour deals with it. It's so bad. Those are just really small snippets. I get told my family should get cancer and die from people on here on a regular basis. Absolutely crazy.'
A professional tennis player posting hate messages on social media after a loss is now an almost weekly occurrence. For Pegula and every other player across both tours, it's fast becoming a reality of their existence that they are powerless to negate.
Charlie Eccleshare
The footage that caught the imagination of the French Open ricocheted around social media Wednesday morning.
Jannik Sinner, the world No. 1, and Boisson, the world No. 361 French wild card and the story of the tournament, were clasping hands over the net on Court Philippe-Chatrier following a morning hit. It was raining early at Roland Garros, so court space and time were limited. Sinner was playing right after the two women's matches, and he didn't want to take the court without a warm-up hit, preferably on Chatrier. He called the player relations desk searching for an opening. They told him to hustle over.
When he got to the court, there was Boisson, whom he knew from years ago when they trained at the same tennis center.
Lois has a new sparring 🚀#RolandGarros pic.twitter.com/ZaR7tqHjYa
— Roland-Garros (@rolandgarros) June 4, 2025
'She said straightaway yes,' Sinner said of Boisson. 'It was a very consistent warmup for a different game style for a woman, because the ball is quite high and quite spinny.'
Sinner said Boisson was 'exactly what France needs,' given that the French don't exactly have a roster of stars beyond Arthur Fils. 'Something very new, very special, great mentality,' he said.
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'She deserves to be in the position where she is right now, and we wish her all the best for the future.'
Matt Futterman
Madison Keys offered an insight into the relentlessness of the tennis calendar when she revealed that she plans to be on the grass getting ready for Wimbledon in just two days' time.
Keys, who lost her three-set French Open quarterfinal to Coco Gauff after losing her way in the decider, was able to go back to Florida between an early exit from the Italian Open in Rome and the start of Roland Garros. . However, there will be no such luxury ahead of the grass-court season, which begins Monday with the new WTA 500 event at the Queen's Club in west London. Keys is wasting no time in getting ready.
'The tennis season doesn't really allow you to ease into anything, so I'm going to London tomorrow, and I imagine I'll be on grass on Friday,' Keys said in a news conference after losing 6-7(6), 6-4, 6-1 to her fellow American.
'That's kind of the reality of the sport.'
Keys was coy about whether she would continue with her previous policy of playing the week before majors. She is not currently entered for the WTA 250 event in Eastbourne, England, where she is a two-time winner, or the 500 event in Bad Homburg, Germany, but she said with a smile: 'We'll see, we'll see how things go.''
A week off ahead of Wimbledon could be what Keys needs to recharge after what's been a grueling year.
Charlie Eccleshare
Tell us what you noticed on the 11th day…
(Top photo of Mirra Andreeva: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic)