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With a week left until the year’s second Grand Slam tournament gets underway at the French Open, I will start writing a series of articles leading up to the tournament.
Here, I will flash back to the 2005 French Open, a tournament which started an era of clay court domination from one man, and continued the underperformance of a home favourite.
The men: Champion Rafael Nadal (first of seven and counting titles)
It was this tournament in which one man would change the course of clay court tennis forever.
An 18-year-old Spaniard by the name of Rafael Nadal entered the French Open as one of the favourites, with 2004 runner-up Guillermo Coria labelling him as “one of the best clay court players today” at the time.
After missing the entire 2004 clay court season due to injury, Nadal dominated to win the Monte Carlo Masters (his first of eight consecutive titles there) and Rome, and had rocketed up the rankings in time to be seeded fourth for his debut at the French Open.
In fact, Nadal was ranked World No. 5, but a rib injury to then-World No. 2 Lleyton Hewitt allowed the Spaniard to be seeded in the top four along with Roger Federer, Andy Roddick and Marat Safin.
We’ll return to Nadal a bit later in this article.
The early rounds were marred by early exits to former champion Andre Agassi (a five-set, first round loss to qualifier Jarkko Nieminen), 2003 US Open champion Andy Roddick and 2004 semi-finalist Tim Henman.
However, in all this wreckage, a young Serbian called Novak Djokovic won his first ever match at a Grand Slam tournament, defeating Robby Ginepri in the first round before retiring against 2004 runner-up Guillermo Coria in the second.
Marat Safin, who captured the Australian Open title earlier in the year, and Coria, both went out in the Round of 16, meaning they missed out on a quarter-final meeting against each other. 2004 champion Gaston Gaudio also bowed out in the pre-quarter-final stage, robbing him of a quarter-final showdown against Rafael Nadal.
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal met each other at a Grand Slam tournament in the semi-finals. Although Federer was the top seed, Nadal entered the match as the favourite, their head-to-head having only been 1-all to this point.
Nadal won in four sets to ultimately reach his first Grand Slam final, in his first such tournament as a seeded player (Nadal had previously played five majors as an unseeded player).
Awaiting him on the opposite side of the net would be Mariano Puerta, who coasted through a quarter which was marred by the aforementioned early exits of Agassi and Roddick, to reach his only major final.
En route, he defeated Ivan Ljubicic in the first round, Guillermo Canas in the quarter-final and Nikolay Davydenko in the semi-finals (after trailing by two sets to one).
The championship match turned out to be a competitive affair. After Puerta took the first set in a tiebreak, Nadal would up his game to take the next two sets, before pulling through a close fourth set to ultimately win his first Grand Slam title, and start an era of domination on clay courts by the Spaniard.
This year, Nadal will be shooting for an eighth title in Paris, something no man has ever achieved at any of the Grand Slam tournaments. By achieving that, he can cement himself as one of the greatest players of all time, which he has already done (he has won eleven major titles and the Olympic gold medal at Beijing in 2008).
The women: Champion Justine Henin-Hardenne (second of four titles)
On the women’s side, the underperformance of Amelie Mauresmo once again overshadowed the French Open, as well as the first round exit of defending champion Anastasia Myskina.
Twice a quarter-finalist, Mauresmo had yet to reach the semi-finals of her home tournament, and once again the pressure was on her to perform in front of her fans.
She received what appeared to be a very easy draw, well, that was until she ran into 17-year-old Serbian and future champion Ana Ivanovic, who had climbed from outside the Top 700 to inside the Top 30 in the space of 18 months, in the third round.
Ivanovic, like Nadal, was to be seeded at a major tournament for the first time.
The Serbian had achieved so much in the last six months, pushing Venus Williams to two tiebreak sets in Zurich, winning her first WTA title in Canberra (thus earning her the nickname “Aussie Ana”).
She then reached the quarter-finals in Miami, knocking out more experienced players in Nadia Petrova and then-defending US Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova en route and reaching the semi-finals in Warsaw, defeating Vera Zvonareva there in the second round.
Mauresmo had proven to be her nemesis during the year, with the Frenchwoman defeating her at the Australian Open, Doha and in Miami. But this time, Ivanovic had other plans.
She won their third round meeting in three sets, thus advancing to the fourth round of a Grand Slam tournament for the first time.
There, she faced another future French Open champion, Francesca Schiavone, in the fourth round. Schiavone had previously reached the quarter-finals in 2001 and many saw her experience as a telling factor in this match.
However, Ivanovic would pull off another three-set miracle, to reach the quarter-finals of only her second Grand Slam tournament.
Her run would come to an end there, being defeated by experienced clay-courter Nadia Petrova, whom Ivanovic had beaten in Miami earlier in the year.
The other big story of the women’s tournament that year was the shock first round exit of Anastasia Myskina.
The 2004 champion had started 2005 very poorly, bombing out early at the Australian Open and Doha (where she was defending champion), and entering the defence of her French Open title with a negative win-loss record for the season.
She became the first defending women’s champion to surrender the title in the first round, losing in three sets to Spaniard Maria Sanchez Lorenzo.
This would eventually lead to her dropping out of the Top 10 later in the year and missing qualification for the year-end championships.
Apart from the aforementioned early losses of Mauresmo and Myskina, there were also many more upsets in the women’s field.
Venus Williams, who would have met Myskina in the fourth round, went out in the third round to 15-year-old Sesil Karatantcheva, who had won the girls’ title the previous year.
The Bulgarian would go on to make the quarter-finals, losing to Elena Likhovtseva, who had defeated Elena Dementieva in the fourth round.
Lindsay Davenport and Maria Sharapova were the top two seeds, but both lost their respective quarter-finals to Mary Pierce and Justine Henin-Hardenne, who would go on to contest the final.
Henin-Hardenne, a second round loser in 2004, destroyed the 2000 champion with two breadsticks in the championship match to win her second title at a tournament which she attended as a child and won as a 15-year-old girl in 1997.
This was the first step towards her returning to the top after an injury-marred past twelve months, triggered by that aforementioned early exit in 2004.
Henin is now happily retired, that title being counted towards seven career major titles, which included another three French Open titles, two US Open titles and one Australian Open title. She also won the Olympic gold medal at Athens in 2004.
Next, I will flashback to the 2008 French Open, a tournament which saw total domination by Rafael Nadal and a changing of the guard on the women’s side of things.
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