French Open semifinals: Should tennis have VAR? Is Swiatek’s serve even better?

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Welcome back to the French Open briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.

On Day 12 of Roland Garros 2024, the women’s semifinals took centre stage.

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Tennis can learn from so many sports on video refereeing

The most frustrating thing about so many of the player vs. chair umpire controversies is how avoidable they are. If only every tournament employed the fully electronic line calling system that is in use at dozens of tournaments, including the U.S. and Australian Opens.

Tennis can get the far more fallible humans off the court, making better decisions and insulating them from criticism for not exactly detecting where a ball travelling over 100 miles per hour has landed in a split-second.

Thursday brought the latest, in the second set of the French Open semifinal between Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff.

A line judge erroneously called a Swiatek serve out instead of in. Since the ball was coming at Gauff at roughly 100 miles per hour, she swung at it and finished her shot, sending a backhand return a couple of feet wide. The chair umpire overruled the call but also ruled that the call hadn’t affected Gauff’s ability and opportunity to return the ball unhindered, so Swiatek deserved to get the point.

Gauff approached umpire Aurelie Tourte and erupted as she almost never does, telling her that the crowd was “booing because they know (she) is wrong,” and telling her to learn the rules of the game she is paid to officiate in a Grand Slam semifinal.

After the match, Gauff was bewildered as to why tennis couldn’t make use of video replays. “I definitely think at this point it’s almost ridiculous that we don’t have it. Not just because that happened to me, but every sport has it,” she said.

“There are so many decisions that are made, and it sucks as a player to go back or online and you see that you were completely right, and it’s, like, what does that give you in that moment?”

Here’s how the situation would have happened with an electronic system:  No out call, no correction. No one yelling as Gauff is focussed on returning a high-speed serve. No discussion of whether the call came before or after her swing. If Gauff had thought the ball was out, she could have watched a computer-generated replay of the ball hitting the court — the one that everyone except the players and the umpires can see on their TV screens.

The call would have been confirmed. Everyone would have moved on.

Get the humans off the court.

Can Iga Swiatek get scarier? Her serve says yes

Wednesday’s women’s quarterfinals were defined by breaks of serve on both sides in both matches.

So too was Iga Swiatek’s quarterfinal against Coco Gauff on Thursday, just in the more conventional way: the player who gets the breaks wins.

Swiatek is a juggernaut at the best of times, an even more advanced version on clay, but the one place she has felt vulnerable, especially against the players that can take time away from her (Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Naomi Osaka… Jelena Ostapenko!), is her serve.

Unfortunately for those players, and with an even more pyrrhic sense of inevitability for everybody else, she appears to be sorting it out.

She still has some work to do in terms of placement. But getting to over 100 weeks at world No. 1, four Grand Slam titles, and another Grand Slam final with a serve that has a lot of work to be done on it? That’s a scary thought.

Mixed-up pairing brings Grand Slam title for France and Germany

Picking a doubles partner can be an exacting process.

Players consider several factors such as: Would we have good chemistry? Do our styles match up? Do they like returning from the ad or the deuce court? And then sometimes, it’s a last-minute shot to nothing that ends up paying off handsomely.

Enter Germany’s Laura Siegemund and Edouard Roger-Vasselin of France, who won the French Open mixed doubles title on Thursday having decided to play together two hours before the entry deadline. Siegemund had been waiting to see what would happen with her singles match against Sofia Kenin on the tournament’s first Sunday and, having lost it, decided she might give the mixed doubles a go. But it was so late in the day that she resigned herself to the fact that there probably wouldn’t be anyone at the level she wanted available.

Then came a text from Roger-Vasselin, a 40-year-old Frenchman who won the men’s doubles here a decade ago and has previously built a redoubtable partnership with compatriot Nicolas Mahut.

And that was that. “I’m really happy that I decided to say yes,” Siegemund said after Thursday’s straight-sets win over Desirae Krawczyk and Neal Skupski in Thursday’s final. “Me too,” added Roger-Vasselin.

Thursday’s results

• Iga Swiatek (1) def. Coco Gauff (3), 6-2, 6-4
• Jasmine Paolini (12) def. Mirra Andreeva 6-3, 6-1

Thursday’s order of play

• Carlos Alcaraz (3) vs Jannik Sinner (2)
• Alexander Zverev (4) vs Casper Ruud (7)

Tell us what you noticed on the 12th day as things continue…

(Top photo: Coco Gauff and Aurelie Tourte by Robert Prange / Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)