In the shoes of world number 5 after her rebirth in 2022, Caroline Garcia embodies the best tricolor hope at Roland-Garros, which opens on Sunday (until June 11), but the Frenchwoman has presented herself badly in her sneakers since several months. Her last press conference ended in tears ten days ago, after her elimination in the third round of the Rome tournament by the 100th player in the world (6-4, 6-4 by Osorio), summarizes the torments that tormented the brain for months.
From this overflow of emotions, Garcia lets go that “it’s been like this for quite a while”. “Sometimes it’s hard, she breathes with a trembling voice. I try hard but it doesn’t work”. There is the weight of expectations, but not only that. “It affects me to do what I do on the pitch, not to do well in fact, simply because I am concerned with what I do, that I make the effort, that I have the impression of do things well, and that I want to go all the way, explains the French number 1. Except that when I arrive on the court, everything I have done well (in training), I do not do it anymore…”
“Nightmare”
“After a while, I would like to know why, and at least manage to control it and change that. But no, it sinks me more and more, and instead of enjoying the moment on the pitch, it becomes a nightmare,” she laments. Six months earlier, the future had everything to look bright for the 29-year-old Lyonnaise. Her triumph at the Masters in Texas, among the eight best players of the season, capped the year of her rebirth, which had taken shape during a hair-raising American summer, with a trophy in Cincinnati followed by a half- final at the US Open, her first Grand Slam.
The key to the ranking, a jump to fourth place in the world. And the prospect then quite realistic of dreaming higher, as it would have, throughout the first half of the 2023 season, few points scored in the same period in 2022 to defend. Alas, things did not go as hoped.
After an average start to the season, since early February Garcia has lost in her first or second match in six of the eight tournaments she has played. The only exceptions: a final (lost to Vekic) in Monterrey (Mexico) and a round of 16 in Indian Wells. And after his trainer Bertrand Perret, who left suddenly just before the Masters (before returning to his side at the beginning of April), it was his physiotherapist and physical trainer Laura Legoupil, the other key person in his revival, who did a lot for the get him back on his feet and rebuild a physique ready for the top level, which suddenly said stop at the end of March.
Three wins, three losses
On clay in 2023, Garcia has a sad record of three wins and three losses. In Madrid at the end of April, her nervousness led her to directly challenge a supporter by throwing at him in the middle of a match: “Do you want to take the racket and come and play maybe?”. In Rome, “I sank on my own”, she regretted. “For a few weeks, and even since the beginning of the year, I have had bad timings, I’m reading the trajectories badly. Surely a problem of concentration, of reading the game, I find it difficult to explain it. It there are phases like that where I make mistakes when nothing is happening, she noted. I make mistakes that can be put in the stupid category.
When the announcement of her return under the leadership of Perret a few weeks earlier, Garcia already made no secret of the difficulties she was going through when she spoke to L’Equipe “the hubbub of (her) thoughts” and her “lost” confidence. Lately “I didn’t follow the results of others too much, I couldn’t. It put too much pressure on me, she admitted. Since the beginning of the year, I panicked too much, I couldn’t think anymore. ” They also surface regularly through his messages posted on social networks. In one of the most recent, embellished with photos taken at the beach and at the restaurant, “I needed a little time to recharge my body and mind,” she wrote. It is all smiles that Garcia walked the Parisian soil on Tuesday upon his arrival. Will she be able to keep it?