US Open: Paris achievers make slow, stuttering starts in New York

Last month, Lorenzo Musetti began his Paris Olympics campaign with a couple of straight-sets victories. At this US Open, the Italian has been taken to four and five sets in his first two rounds; the latest a 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, 2-6, 5-7 escape from the brink of exit against Miomir Kecmanovic saving match points on Wednesday.

The common link between Zheng and Musetti: they’re coming off medal-winning performances at the Olympics. The former captured the women’s singles gold, beating Iga Swiatek no less at Roland Garros in the semi-finals. The latter took the men’s singles bronze, getting past French Open finalist Alexander Zverev in straight sets in the quarter-finals.

Both are struggling to bring out their most fluent game in the season-ending Grand Slam in New York, barely three weeks after stringing together one of their finest runs in a tournament for their career’s most decorated silverware. They’re not alone.

Felix Auger-Aliassime, the 19th-ranked Canadian who finished fourth at the Olympics, crashed out in the opening round of the US Open to an 18-year-old Jakub Mensik ranked 65 in the world. Anna Karolina Schmiedlova, the surprise Olympic semi-finalist, was also sent packing from the US Open without a win.

The expected medal winners of Paris have also looked a touch scrappy thus far in New York. Men’s silver medallist Carlos Alcaraz dropped the second set in his first-round win; women’s bronze medallist Swiatek raked up a higher-than-usual volume of errors in her first outing; men’s gold winner Novak Djokovic was tested, even physically, in the second round on Wednesday before Laslo Djere retired.

Momentum is considered a boon in elite sport. That doesn’t seem to resonate with tennis players going from the Olympics to a Slam in about three weeks. Perhaps because not only do their exhausted bodies need some breathing space, their elated minds and hearts also need time to move on from the buzz of becoming an Olympic medallist.

“It is really hard,” Chinese Zheng said in New York of the challenge of moving on from her Olympics high and getting back down to work at the US Open in a couple of weeks.

“I know how much the gold medal means to my country, my family, also for me. It’s not like you get a gold medal before. It’s the first one, so of course that successful feeling will stay with you for a long time.”

Tennis, and the brutal demands of its professional tour, doesn’t allow for that luxury. What has made this year’s Olympics-to-Slam quick turnaround trickier is the change of surfaces. Top players are used to going from clay to grass to hard courts, except this year they’ve had to go from clay to grass to clay again and then to hard courts. And almost all of them have struggled in the transition while turning up in the tune-up events for the US Open — be it due to the surface change or paucity of refuelling time.

Alcaraz lost in the first match he played in Cincinnati between the Olympics and US Open. Musetti lost in the second match while Djokovic stayed away. All the three women medal winners from Paris turned up at Cincinnati, where Zheng and silver medallist Donna Vekic were defeated in the second round with only Swiatek reaching the semi-finals.

“It’s a little tricky this year (for) people coming from Paris,” said world No.6 Jessica Pegula, who was ousted from the second round of the Olympics only to go on and win the Toronto title and make the Cincinnati final coming into the US Open. “People are just a little bit maybe not as prepared, just with the surface change as well.”

That is shown in the slow, stuttering starts for a lot of the Paris achievers in New York so far.

The Tokyo achievers of three years ago suffered a similar plight competing in the final Slam of the season in the same month, despite the Tokyo Games being played on hard courts. Two of the three men’s singles medal winners of Tokyo crashed out in the first round of the 2021 US Open (Karen Khachanov and Pablo Carreno Busta). Women’s singles silver winner Marketa Vondrousova exited in the second round. The farthest any of the six medal winners went in New York was the semi-final (Alexander Zverev).

This year’s Olympic medallists flaunt more Slam-winning pedigree, and they will need every bit of that to back up their fruitful Games at the Big Apple.