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The king is dead, long live the king. As tennis moves to clay courts for the next few months, one of the sport’s greatest on the surface will be abscent for the first time in two decades. A clay-court swing without Rafael Nadal seemed implausible for so long, but now it has arrived.In his absence, a cast of men’s tennis characters will be looking to take up the mantle, while on the women’s side, another clutch of players will be looking to topple the contemporary queen of clay, Iga Świątek.
Elsewhere, there’s a return from a doping ban, a new umpiring system and much more to contend with. Here’s what to look out for during the European clay-court swing.
El Rey in absentia
The main character of the men’s clay-court season will be someone other than Nadal for the first time in around two decades. He may not have won the French Open every year from 2005 onwards, but even when he didn’t, the state of his game and body was always the main talking point. Before Nadal lost to Alexander Zverev in the first round of his final French Open last year, all anyone was talking about in April and May was how his body would hold up on the surface he had owned for the previous 19 years.
With Nadal retired, someone else has the opportunity to make the next couple of months their own. Maybe it will be Carlos Alcaraz, the reigning French Open champion, or one of the last two runners-up, Zverev and Casper Ruud. The world No. 1, Jannik Sinner, will surely fancy his chances when he returns to tennis at the Italian Open in May, with most of his rivals in various states of disrepair.
The most intriguing player in all this is Novak Djokovic, the man who suffered more than anyone from Nadal’s absurd domination at Roland Garros. Djokovic is considered one of the greatest clay-courters of all-time, but his relationship with Roland Garros is one of frustration and disappointment. Three titles would be a dream-like haul for pretty much every other player, but for Djokovic, the tally would likely be far higher were it not for Nadal (and a red-lining Stan Wawrinka in 2015.)
Djokovic won his only title of 2024 at Roland Garros, beating Alcaraz in their titanic Olympic gold medal match. As he searches for his 25th Grand Slam title (and if he does not win a title before late May, his 100th overall), the red clay of Paris may be his best surface for success.
A date with destiny for a clay-court star
This is where it gets real for Świątek.
She has not won a tournament since last year’s French Open. That includes a semifinal loss to Zheng Qinwen in the 2024 Paris Olympics on the red clay that she has ruled for three years. This season, she has come up short of her past successes on hard courts in February and March, relinquishing the Qatar Open title she had won three times in a row and losing to the eventual champion at the Australian Open and also at Indian Wells, where she was defending champion.
If similar dominoes fall on the red dirt, alarm bells might start going off. Whether they should or not is another question. Świątek was a point from the Australian Open final before Keys played three inspired points in a row; her loss to Alexandra Eala, the 19-year-old wild card from the Philippines who beat her in Miami, was the kind of one-off upset that any player can suffer.
Then there’s the fact the ranking system means winning a tennis title one year becomes par the next year; if Świątek goes four for four at Roland Garros, or defends her titles at the Madrid and Rome Opens, she’ll get no change in her gap to world No. 1 Sabalenka despite those being remarkable achievements.
“It’s nice to learn from losses, but there are other things ahead,” she said after the loss to Eala. But then came a bit of a hedge.
“I’m happy that we’re going to play on clay. I don’t know how it’s going to look like this year, but for sure I’ll work hard to be ready.”
She will need to be ready, fair or not. The surface which spins her forehand highest and gives her the time to plow through opponents may also afford her the comfort to work on the elements of her game that she is changing, including her serve and her tendency, in some defeats, to descend into a flurry of wild groundstroke errors. The pressure of it being her favorite surface may have the opposite effect. Whatever happens, a few wins where a tennis player feels comfortable is usually a good place from which to build.
Another world No. 2 at an inflection point
It might get worse for Zverev before it gets better.
After the Australian Open, he became the de facto world No. 1, with Sinner sidelined for his doping suspension. Zverev, last year’s French Open finalist and Italian Open champion, headed to South America to play the Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro Opens, figuring he could clean up on points given his clay court prowess and make a play for the summit.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Zverev, an avid golfer, has been well below par since then. He’s 6-6 since Australia. Worse, he doesn’t seem to know what’s wrong with his game.
He was 3-3 on the clay in South America, and the early events on clay in Europe haven’t been kind to him historically. In a news conference in Miami, Zverev said the adjustment from hard courts to red clay takes some time for him. He returns from further back in the court. He puts a different shape on the ball; because of the change in bounce, he even adjusts his swing path.
As a result, Monte Carlo and Munich, both of which are sort of home tournaments for him, rarely go all that well. Madrid can be better. He won it in 2021 and made the final in 2022. By Rome, he’s ready to roll, but the question this year is how his psyche will absorb any early losses after two months of falling short of his own expectations. There was a world where he could have snatched the No. 1 ranking from Sinner.
Right now, that’s something of a fantasy world, as Zverev has been the first to admit. He did so once more after frittering a third-set lead to Arthur Fils in Miami.
“I have to look at myself more than anything else,” he said.
And two world No. 1s with a point to prove
Sabalenka is in the enviable position of being world No. 1 but not having a great deal of pressure on her shoulders over the next couple of months.
She won’t see it like that and will be desperate to win a first French Open title, but Świątek is the de facto No. 1 in this part of the year.
Sabalenka is so good and so absurdly consistent that there’s no reason she can’t have a great season on the clay and end it with a proper crack at winning at least a third title on the surface and perhaps a first major away from hard courts. She was a French Open semifinalist two years ago and would likely have repeated the feat in 2024 were it not for a bout of food poisoning that left her shaken against Mirra Andreeva in the quarterfinals. Before that, she reached the final in both Madrid and Rome, losing to Świątek on both occasions.
Sabalenka has also added tools to her game, particularly the slice and the drop shot, which are vital for success on the surface. Right now, she looks ready to capitalize on any wobble from her adversary, and in a sport in which timing is everything, she could spy an opportunity.
Maybe there will be some pressure on her after all.
Meanwhile, Sinner’s form after his return from a three-month doping ban could decide the destination of this year’s French Open title.
He will come back well-rested, but that’s unlikely to be the key to his causing Alcaraz, Djokovic and co a problem in Paris. Even for the best player in the world, three months without elite-level competition is a long time, and he’ll have just two tournaments — his home event in Rome and the Hamburg Open in Germany — to get match-tough for the French Open. For a player who has tended to struggle in the longest Grand Slam matches he has played, that may not be enough.
Off the court, he might be on the receiving end of some lingering frostiness in public and in private, but Sinner has, on numerous occasions, said he is used to blocking out external voices.
The 1990s generation could be on the way down again
For the poor lost boys of men’s tennis, the so-called “sandwich generation” born in the 1990s, it could be another rough couple of months.
Players born in the 2000s have dominated the start of 2025, with Sinner, Jack Draper and Jakub Menšík winning the three biggest titles, and things could be about to get worse for Stefanos Tsitsipas, Casper Ruud and Andrey Rublev in particular. They all have a lot of points to defend and none of them have been very consistent at the biggest events this season, despite all of them having 500-level titles or finals to their names in 2025.
Tsitsipas won the Monte Carlo Masters last year. Ruud lost to Tsitsipas in the final there and won the Barcelona Open, while Rublev won the Madrid Open. Ruud and Tsitsipas have semifinal and quarterfinal points to defend at the French Open, too. By the end of the clay-court season, all three could join Daniil Medvedev, another struggling member of their generation, in exiting the top 10.
The glass-half-full read on this is that Tsitsipas and Ruud are excellent clay-court players, so this period offers them the chance to rediscover their best level.
But a young star in waiting could be ready to ascend
Twenty years ago, a 19-year-old who grew up on clay showed up at Roland Garros for the first time and walked away with the French Open title.
Strange as it may seem, Nadal was the favorite that year, with good reason. He’d won all three of the warm-up tournaments in Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome.
No one is suggesting that’s where Joao Fonseca of Brazil will be in six weeks. He is just 18 and he’s probably not going to sweep the red-clay ATP 1,000s. If he does, he certainly will be the favorite heading into Roland Garros.
That said, Fonseca may have the X-factor for men’s tennis this clay-court season. He won Buenos Aires, becoming the fourth-youngest man to win an ATP Tour title this century, and he’s played more tennis on clay in his life than on any other surface. Fonseca has only just cracked the top 60, but there is widespread agreement that he’s way better than his ranking right now. That makes him one of the most dangerous floaters in any draw, especially on a surface he knows well.
Maybe he’s a year or two away from competing for these big titles in historic venues, but any player who sees Fonseca’s name next to theirs on a draw sheet is going to immediately think they’re not just facing a hot prospect, but also a future clay-court champion.
What’s a good clay-court campaign for a woman not named Świątek or Sabalenka?
Świątek and Sabalenka are clearly the big favorites to win the big titles this clay-court season. So if not them, who else? And what does a good clay-court season even look like for a player in the next collection of contenders?
Starting with the players who cut against the stereotype of Americans being allergic to clay because they all played on it plenty growing up, Coco Gauff and Keys look well-placed. Gauff was 10 when she started spending time at the Mouratoglou Academy in the south of France. Keys and Stephens, both French Open finalists, spent their formative years at the Evert Academy in Florida. When it rained basically every afternoon, the green clay courts there dried out the fastest, so that’s where they headed.
Emma Navarro grew up in Charleston, S.C., where there is plenty of green clay, including at the Charleston Open. She relishes physical three-set battles, which clay can often bring.
Jessica Pegula, the world No. 3, and a U.S. Open finalist in September, has not had a ton of success on clay, but said after her loss in the Miami final that she remains hopeful.
“I know I’m known more as a hard court player, but I think I can do well on the clay, too,” she said. “Hopefully, with some of those intangibles that I have added to my game, that can help me have a good clay season.”
She duly won this year’s Charleston title, beating Sofia Kenin, another American French Open finalist of the past.
Gauff, the 2022 French Open finalist, is 11th in the race for the WTA Tour finals and still trying to find consistency with her serve and her forehand. Still, it’s unlikely she and Keys will leave the European clay satisfied with anything less than making the final in one of the big events. If Pegula and Navarro are playing beyond the round of 16, they will feel like they’ve made progress.
Outside of the Americans, Zheng Qinwen, the 2024 Olympic champion who toppled Swiatek on the way to a gold medal at Roland Garros, has every right to believe she should be in the mix each week. She’s based in Spain and her coach, Spaniard Pere Riba, knows his way around a clay court.
Likewise, Andreeva is expecting big things from herself. Her original breakthrough came on clay. She was a semifinalist in Paris last year. Can Jasmine Paolini get to another final? She believes she can. Elena Rybakina has beaten Świątek twice on clay, though one win came when Świątek retired with injury. She’s looking to arrest her slide down the top 10.
It may prove that a late-round loss to Świątek or Sabalenka awaits some or all of these players. It will be gutting in the moment, but in hindsight, it might not look so bad. Keys lost to Świątek in the semifinals of the Madrid Open and the quarterfinals of the Italian Open last year. She then went to Strasbourg in France and won the title. In Paris, she fell to Navarro in the third round in two tiebreak sets, a loss that has also aged quite well.
Things to keep an eye on…
Electronic line-calling, or ELC. Ball marks on clay are capricious, sometimes creating a false impression of whether or not a shot has clipped the line. ELC gets rid of this problem, but it doesn’t erase the physical marks, so look out for umpires asking players to not believe their eyes at a key moment. Historically, transitions in systems of knowledge aren’t smooth. This one likely won’t be either.
Surface tension. Especially between Madrid and Rome, the back-to-back ATP and WTA 1,000 events. Madrid’s altitude (657m above sea level vs. 140 for Rome) makes it much more hospitable to servers.
The world No. 32s. Some players say they don’t care about their rankings; some players say they consume them. What’s not in question is that at the Grand Slams, 32 is the magic number, the cut-off for being seeded and avoiding a dangerous floater in the first round. That’s even more important with two 1,000s to come, whose 96-player draws also feature 32 seeds. Speaking of floaters…
The floaters. Fonseca is the player no one wants to meet on the ATP, alongside a resurgent Gael Monfils. On the women’s side, Belinda Bencic and Kenin will be players to avoid, along with Ons Jabeur and Camila Osorio.
The Z-game. Tennis is a three-dimensional sport, but the benefits of using elevation are never clearer than when it arrives on clay. In last year’s French Open men’s final, Alcaraz used a succession of groundstrokes lofted high into the air to break Zverev’s rhythm. These arcing shots aren’t lobs — the intention is not to hit the ball over a player. Rather, a looping shot hit with topspin kicks up off the dirt and gets players to hit the ball way above their shoulders, but the surface slows the ball down so much on contact that they also have to use all their might to generate the power to get it back with any interest. Along with the drop shot, this tactic can be one of the keys to success on clay.
Tell us the storylines and players you’ll be watching out for — and don’t forget to leave your predictions in the comments.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women's Tennis
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