by Keley Busby
Outside of Rafa Nadal’s dominant run at Roland Garros, the French Open rarely follows a neat script. Still, 2026 tore it up and tossed the shreds into the Paris wind.
Fifteen seeds vanished in round one alone, a jailbreak that included three men’s top-10 seeds and one from the women’s top tier, the normally consistent No. 3 seed Jessica Pegula. Months after Melbourne’s orderly procession of favorites, Paris delivered the opposite: only two of the top eight seeds reached the quarterfinals (Alexander Zverev and Aryna Sabalanka), and for the first time in the Open Era not a single men’s major champion made it to the round of 16. The results felt less like a bracket than a live-wire experiment where heat tolerance, nerve, and problem-solving trumped pedigree.
The women’s draw bore the sharpest edge, with No. 114 ranked qualifier Maja Chwalinska making it all the way to the final. Her former doubles partner in juniors and fellow Pole Iga Swiatek arrived in Paris with a 30–3 record at Roland Garros since 2020, but fell in the fourth round to Np. 15 Marta Kostyuk, guaranteeing a first-time champion. World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was toppled by lefty Diana Shnaider; Coco Gauff, the defending champion, exited before the semifinals; and Russian teenager Mirra Andreeva continued her rise with resilient, cool-headed tennis, including a surprisingly decisive victory against Kostyuk, whom she’d lost to two times earlier this year.
Before losing to Andreeva 3-6, 2-6 in the final, southpaw Maja Chwalinska had a truly fairy tale run in Paris, defeating an Olympic Champion and three seeds while dropping just one set, to become the first qualifier to reach the finals in 125 years of the French Open. Her arsenal of lefty backhand slices and heavy top spin forehands threw off the rhythm of seasoned opponents such as Maria Sakarri, Elise Mertens and Anna Kalanskaya. She said it herself: “I know I’m playing different tennis than most of the girls on tour. I don’t have the conditions to play strong, so I need to develop different weapons. I just try to change the rhythm a lot. I feel like it’s pretty tough to play against this kind of style, because you don’t have any rhythm — every ball can be different.”
As a junior, she rose through the ranks with her close friend Świątek, and both made their professional debuts at the same tournament in Zawada, Poland, in 2015. They finished runners-up together in the 2017 Australian Open junior doubles final. “Iga and I have a lot of history in common,” Chwalińska said in Paris. “We went through a lot together and it brought us together.” Świątek went on to win Roland Garros four times. Chwalińska took a different road — including a year away from tennis at 19 after revealing she had been suffering from depression — before grinding back through the ITF circuit to No. 114 in the world. A Polish company that sponsors Świątek quietly covered her hotel costs when she ran out of funds mid-tournament (her well-earned 1.6 million dollar paycheck wasn’t handed out until completion of the final).
The often fiery 19-year-old Andreeva hoisted the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen after practicing patience and pressing Chwalinska at every opportunity to become the youngest champion since and 18-year-oldMonica Seles won in 1992.
At Roland Garros 2026, the opponent across the net was often secondary to the extreme weather. Unprecedented heat arrived first, then the wind — and by the time the final was played, both had claimed as many victims as any player in the draw. France experienced its hottest May on record. Starting on May 24—the day the French Open began—a record-shattering heatwave pushed temperatures 10–15°C above normal and May 26 was the hottest May day in French history, with climate scientists describing the event as a roughly one-in-1,000 occurrence for this time of year. Sinner and Djokovic, amongst others, wilted in their five-set defeats and without Carlos Alcaraz in the draw, it became the first time in the Open Era that no former major champion reached the round of 16 at a Grand Slam tournament. The chaos produced surreal matchups, including a Matteo Berrettini – Matteo Arnaldi quarterfinal between two players ranked outside the top 100, the first such Slam pairing since 1991. Like the women’s event, whoever lifts the trophy in Paris, Cobolli or Zverev, will be a first-time Slam winner.
Officiating grabbed its own headlines too. In João Fonseca’s upset of Casper Ruud, a late second-set tiebreak sequence—ball called out, then corrected—triggered confusion over whether to replay or award the point, drawing immediate broadcast criticism and swinging momentum at a hinge of the match. Tournament director Amélie Mauresmo defended retaining human line judges afterward, noting electronic systems are “not 100% reliable.” The moment stood out all the more because the US Open, Australian Open, and Wimbledon use electronic line-calling across all courts, as do all the clay court tournaments leading into Paris.
Roland Garros didn’t just crown two new champions- it laid bare how unpredictable life can be, especially on clay during the era of climate chaos. Will Sabalanka, Gauff and Swiatek recover on the grass later this month or will Andreeva continue her rise? Will Zverev finally take home a Slam? This year, Paris erupted into the most unpredictable fortnight in recent memory and made clear that anything is possible and that dreams really do come true.
