French Open 2025: Aryna Sabalenka wins quickly in straight sets; Tommy Paul, Frances Tiafoe also advance
No. 1 seed Aryna Sabalenka needed only one hour to dispatch Kamilla Rakhimova at the French Open on Sunday May 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Aryna Sabalenka looked every bit like the world's No. 1 player as she began the 2025 French Open with a dominant win over Kamilla Rakhimova in straight sets, 6-1, 6-0.
Sabalenka finished off Rakhimova in one hour, putting her recent defeat to Qinwen Zheng at the Italian Open in the distance. She served up five aces and broke serve five times during the match.
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With the win, Sabalenka became the first top seed to lose just one game in her opening match of the tournament since Serena Williams did so in 2013 versus Anna Tatishvili. Williams went on to win the French Open that year, and Sabalenka would love to follow that path. Sabalenka has never made it to the finals at Roland-Garros, getting as far as the semifinals in 2023, when she lost in three sets to Karolina Muchová.
Sabalenka joked after her match that she would ask for advice from 14-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal, who was being honored at Roland-Garros following his retirement.
'He is such an inspiration to young players," Sabalenka said, via The Tennis Gazette. "I will try and stick around to watch the ceremony, and ask him, please do you have advice on how to win this tournament?'
Up next for Sabalenka is either Jil Teichmann.
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Tommy Paul wins first-round match
Tommy Paul made news recently off the court by having his truck repossessed in Florida while he played in the Rome Open. Paul lost to Jannik Sinner in that tournament, but earned enough prize money to get his truck back.
Presumably, he'll have no such concerns preoccupying him in Paris. The No. 12 seed defeated Elmer Moller in four sets, 6-7 (5), 6-2, 6-3, 6-1. After the losing the first set, a rain delay allowed Paul an opportunity to reset.
Paul will face Márton Fucsovics in the second round. Fucsovics beat Tristan Schoolkate in straight sets in his first-round match.
Frances Tiafoe endures through sluggish second set
Following a first-round defeat at the Rome Open, No. 15 seed Frances Tiafoe rebounded with a win over Roman Safiullin, 6-4, 7-5, 6-4. Tiafoe seemed to have difficulty maintaining focus during the second set and Safiulli nearly made him pay for it.
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The American has struggled so far this year, losing five of nine matches heading into Paris. Roland-Garros has been rough on Tiafoe, where he's won only four career matches.
Tiafoe moves on to play Pablo Carreño Busta in the second round on Wednesday. He lost in the first round in his first six French Opens, but has now gotten to the second round in four consecutive years. Tiafoe has only advanced to the third round at Roland-Garros once, where he lost to Alexander Zverev in 2023.
This post will be updated throughout the day's tournament play.
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Djokovic and Sinner chase French Open semis as underdogs look for upsets
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Mt. Everest's Xenon-Gas Controversy Will Last Forever
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They're also making people very angry. The xenon-fueled expedition was organized by an Austrian guide named Lukas Furtenbach, who is known for his tech-focused approach to expeditions. He has previously had clients sleep in altitude tents at home for weeks to pre-acclimatize them to the thin mountain air. What made the new ascent different is that, in addition to sleeping in altitude tents, the four British climbers visited a clinic in Germany where they inhaled xenon gas, whose oxygen-boosting potential has been rumored for years. The World Anti-Doping Agency banned xenon in 2014 after allegations that Russian athletes used it for that year's Winter Olympics. But subsequent studies on its athletic effects have produced mixed results. Other research in animals has hinted at the possibility that it could offer protection from potentially fatal forms of altitude illness, which can occur when climbers ascend too rapidly. For now, the strongest evidence that it helps high-altitude mountaineers comes from Furtenbach's own self-experimentation over the past few years. When news of Furtenbach's plans emerged earlier this year, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation's medical commission put out a statement arguing that xenon probably doesn't work and could be dangerous because of its sedative effects. Other critics have pointed out that shorter expeditions mean less paying work for the Sherpa guides in the region. But these criticisms can feel like post hoc justifications for the fact that many mountaineers simply have a gut-level aversion to what seems like a shortcut to the summit. Their objection isn't to xenon itself but to the idea of making Everest easier. That's the same problem many runners have with Kipyegon's sub-four-minute-mile attempt. Women have made extraordinary progress in the event since Diane Leather notched the first sub-five in 1954, but under conventional racing conditions, no one expects a sub-four anytime soon. Kipyegon is the fastest female miler in history: Her current world record, set in 2023, is 4:07.64, which leaves her more than 50 yards behind four-minute pace—an enormous deficit to overcome in a sport where, at the professional level, progress is measured in fractions of a second. Nike has promised 'a holistic system of support that optimizes every aspect of her attempt,' including 'footwear, apparel, aerodynamics, physiology and mind science,' but hasn't revealed any details of what that support might look like. That means critics—and there are many—don't yet have any specific innovation to object to; they just have the tautological sense that any intervention capable of instantly making a miler 7.7 seconds faster must by definition be unfair. 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In 1978, a quarter century after Hillary and Norgay's historic ascent, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen. One view of innovation in sports, advanced by the bioethicist Thomas Murray, is that people's perceptions are shaped by how new ideas and techniques are introduced. The status quo always seems reasonable: Of course we play tennis with graphite rackets rather than wooden ones, use the head-first Fosbury flop to clear high-jump bars, and climb mountains with the slightly stretchable kernmantle ropes developed in the 1950s. But many of these same innovations seem more troublesome during the transition periods, especially if only some people have access to them. When Bannister finally broke the four-minute barrier, he was once again paced by his training partners, but only for about the first three-quarters of the race. This form of pacing remained highly controversial, but because none of the pacemakers had deliberately allowed himself to be lapped, the record was allowed to stand. These days, such pacing is so routine that there are runners who make a living doing nothing but pacing races for others, always dropping out before the finish. The full-race pacing that Kipyegon will likely use in Breaking4 remains verboten; the slightly different pacing that leads runners almost all the way through the race but forces them to run the last lap alone is simply business as usual. Oxygen in a can is good; xenon in a can is bad. These are subtle distinctions. Sports are, in at least some respects, a zero-sum game: When one person wins a race or sets a record, it unavoidably means that someone else doesn't. Even at the recreational level, if everyone decides to run marathons in carbon-plated shoes that make them five minutes faster, the standards needed to qualify for the Boston Marathon get five minutes faster. 'Once an effective technology gets adopted in a sport, it becomes tyrannical,' Murray told me several years ago, when I was writing about athletes experimenting with electric brain stimulation. 'You have to use it.' In the '50s, a version of that rationale seemed to help the British expedition that included Hillary and Norgay overcome the long-standing objections of British climbers to using oxygen—the French had an Everest expedition planned for 1954 and the Swiss for 1955, and both were expected to use oxygen. Less clear, though, is why this rationale should apply to the modern world of recreational mountaineering in which Furtenbach operates. 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