Lois Boisson and the fairytale French Open run that deserves Roland Garros' biggest stage

New York Times

3 days ago

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — It is the sort of fairytale run that French tennis officials dream about.
All the host nation's players, men and women, are usually long gone by this stage of their Grand Slam tournament. But Loïs Boisson, arguably the unlikeliest last one standing of the 27 players representing France who locked into the French Open starting gate a week ago Sunday, took to the red clay of Roland Garros Wednesday alongside the best in the world, for the quarterfinals.
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In beating the world No. 3, Jessica Pegula, Boisson became the first French man or woman to reach the last eight here since 2017. She did it on a packed-to-the-gunwales Court Philippe-Chatrier, in front of a crowd of 15,000 screaming at every Boisson winner and every Pegula error as only a hometown crowd losing its mind during a borderline-inconceivable upset can do.
Against Pegula, the crowd had been sparse early on, as it often is at the beginning of the day, when the women's matches tend to be scheduled. Those late-arriving Parisians who take their time over lunch normally settle into the stadium in time for the second contest of the day. But by the middle of the second set, when Pegula began to falter and Boisson started her charge, numbing the American with a seductive mix of spins and deep, looping balls before a shock of power across the net, the French had found their new hero — and their voice.
At the end, during those nervy last four games when Boisson scrambled Pegula's brain for the final time, there might not have been a soul across Roland Garros, either in the stadium itself or the plazas outside it, who wasn't all in on this woman who had played just one top-tier WTA Tour match ahead of this tournament.
'In the beginning, even though there weren't many, you can still hear them on center court,' Boisson said with a combination of shyness and emotional exhaustion during her post-match news conference.
'But for the third set, it was full. It was incredible. As soon as a point was tight, it would be really incredible.'
When the time came to play Mirra Andreeva, the 18-year-old Russian who is basically a Grand Slam veteran these days, the stadium was closer to full from almost the beginning. It was quiet to begin, as Andreeva's singeing backhand down the line and court coverage kept Boisson's weaponry at bay. But late in a first set that looked lost, Boisson started to find the patterns that had taken her past Pegula.
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Camping in her backhand corner, Boisson can hit inside-out forehands that rise and dip all day. But what's more important is her ability to lace them down the line, keeping her opponent honest in those diagonal exchanges. She burned Andreeva again and again and again as the set wore on, dragging the Russian into a tiebreak and stealing it away to win the first set.
The world No. 361, Boisson was only playing in this tournament thanks to the generosity and desperation of France's tennis federation. The country had just two players in the WTA top 100 in early May, but as the owner and organizer of this event, the federation was able to award wild-card entries to seven other Frenchwomen.
Boisson, who hails from Dijon, 200 miles southeast of Paris in Burgundy, is just four months into a comeback from surgery to repair an ACL knee ligament tear. She was world No. 513 then, before winning 16 of 21 lower-tier matches in the run-up to Roland Garros. When her injury happened, she was supposed to be preparing for her French Open debut, having received a wild card on the back of winning four tournaments in the first four months of 2024 and 31 matches of 38 played.
She has paid back France's tennis federation, the FFT, in spades, becoming the story of the tournament. Even in a week that Paris Saint-Germain became kings of European soccer, Boisson has landed on the cover of the dailies and at the top end of news programs. She is the most famous French sportswoman, if only for a fortnight.
And the only place in the country that she hasn't been given true, top billing is the tournament at which she is the star.
Thanks to Boisson and Pegula's exploits, two women again delivered what the leaders of this tournament — Gilles Moretton, the president of the FFT, and Amelie Mauresmo, the former world No. 1 and French Open tournament director — said they most likely could not: roughly two-and-a-half hours of scintillating competition worthy of the biggest stage at the event.
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In the round of 16, Iga Świątek, the four-time Roland Garros champion, and Elena Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon winner, went the distance in a match that saw Swiatek rise from a coffin of red clay to outlast one of her staunchest rivals. On Saturday, Boisson and her compatriot, Elsa Jacquemot, another French wild card, had wowed a packed stadium on Court Simonne-Mathieu.
The triptych of banner matches for women's tennis followed a week of Moretton and Mauresmo insisting that putting a women's match in the Philippe-Chatrier night session would be bad for spectators. It would risk, they said, not giving fans the sort of entertainment for which they had plunked down hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of euros.
On the second day of the tournament, Moretton had said that organizers base the night-session assignment on what is 'better for sport', adding that the people who make the schedule 'have to think about what could be better for spectators.'
Five days later, Mauresmo insisted that the issue wasn't about women's matches not being 'worthy to play at night' but about their length. She looks at the sold-out Chatrier after sunset and wonders what all the fuss is about. People love the product on offer. 'What's the problem?'
Several of the most prominent women in the tournament have had serious issues with Mauresmo's and Moretton's interpretation of what would be 'better for spectators.'
'I do think that women's matches are worthy of a night spot,' said Gauff, who often plays then at the U.S. Open in front of 24,000 people at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Ons Jabeur, the three-time major finalist who has been sidelined by injuries for much of the past year, targeted organizers after her first-round loss. 'I hope whoever is making the decision, I don't think they have daughters, because I don't think they want to treat their daughters like this,' she said in a news conference Tuesday.
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Jabeur also wrote on social media: 'A lot of amazing athletes have been told the same things over and over. That no one watches. That no one cares. That women's sport doesn't 'move people.' Judgment comes quickly, often from those who've never even watched a full match. One empty stadium is held up as proof. The packed ones? Conveniently ignored.'
Madison Keys, the reigning Australian Open champion, lost to Gauff in the quarterfinal before Boisson and Andreeva took the court, was characteristically understated but no less pointed in her criticism.
'I think women typically have night matches everywhere else,' said Keys, whose final four matches in Melbourne, against Elina Svitolina, Rybakina, Świątek and Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, were four of the most riveting duels in the sport this year. 'I think women's matches are very entertaining and they have great value, and they deserve to be the feature match.'
Swiatek was matter-of-fact in saying that 'they should be equal'.
The matches that have made the cut for primetime have only strengthened the words of Gauff, Jabeur, Keys, Świątek and Pegula, who compared talking about the issue every year to 'hitting her head against the wall.'
In more than half of the night sessions in 2025, patrons have witnessed lopsided wins from the top men that didn't last as long as those missed opportunities to feature the women. Jannik Sinner (twice), Novak Djokovic and Holger Rune all dispatched their opponents in just over two hours, with the outcome of the match all but certain long before the conclusion. Carlos Alcaraz needed 94 minutes of thunderclap tennis to overwhelm an injured Tommy Paul.
Last year offered much of the same. Richard Gasquet, a French favorite-son now ranked No. 124, and countryman Pierre-Hugues Herbert, a wild card doubles specialist, were deemed worthy of the bright lights in their mismatches against Sinner and Djokovic. No women made the cut.
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And so it was for Boisson as she took on Andreeva, the brightest of new lights in the women's top 10. Andreeva won two WTA 1,000s in a row earlier this year, the level just below the Grand Slams. No other player, man or woman, has accomplished that this season. Andreeva looked like that player in the second set, moving up 3-0 with a combination of quality and mental strength.
But the intriguing relationship between youth and experience at the heart of this match had not fully blossomed. Boisson is four years Andreeva's senior, but this is her first Grand Slam main draw. Andreeva is a French Open semifinalist, but she had never played a player with home advantage deep in a major. The crowd was doing everything it could to disrupt the flow of the match and turn it in Boisson's favor, and Andreeva, slowly and then all at once, looked like the player who had never been there before.
With Boisson serving down 3-2, Andreeva gestured up at her box as if telling someone to leave. At 3-3, Andreeva missed a volley on top of the net and rocketed a ball into the top tier of Court Philippe-Chatrier. The boos that erupted sucked in every last bit of air in the stadium. When Andreeva double-faulted to give Boisson the break, the match felt like it was over, and so it was. Boisson streaked her back with the red clay, celebrating the most unlikely 7-6(6), 6-3 win and semifinal berth in a match that lasted 128 minutes, 34 more than Alcaraz's beatdown of Paul.
The tournament can point to tangible reasons on this occasion. Andreeva's presence in the women's doubles event means she has to play earlier because she has another match later in the day. The women's semifinals are the day after that Boisson-Andreeva quarterfinal, so playing earlier gave them more time to rest. But that is a necessity because the women's semifinals are played as a one-day session, straight through from 3 p.m. The men's semis are split across two sessions: 3 p.m. and 'not before' 7 p.m. A similar arrangement for the women's matches would have permitted a later slot for one of their quarterfinals.
The tournament put Boisson and Andreeva in the second Philippe-Chatrier slot, by which time the stadium was close to capacity for a tussle between two players who rely on guile, variety and the ability to conjure a bullet groundstroke among the magic at any given moment.
Boisson, a seemingly cool cat who walked onto Chatrier for her morning hit on Monday with a sense of awe and determination, was ready for the challenge.
'I told myself, 'OK, I will play matches on this court, but it's OK. It's a court, like every court'.' She might have to get more used to it, too. Having started the event at No. 361 in the world, she will end it inside the top 60. That makes her the number one women's tennis player in France.
She will get another chance to tell herself things are OK Thursday, against Coco Gauff, the world No. 2. Just not at night.