Semi Surprises

“She’s looking very relaxed!”

Martina Navratilova, commentating in a TV booth above Court Philippe Chatrier on Monday, sounded frankly surprised to be uttering these words. It wasn’t hard to understand why: She was talking about Ana Ivanovic.

Ivanovic is a former No. 1 and Grand Slam champion, but “relaxed” is not the first—or second, or fifth—word that comes to mind when you think of her and her career. On court she’s superstitious enough to avoid stepping on lines; off court, she talks a mile a minute, if not more, and gives coaches the heave-ho on a near-monthly basis. Five years ago, her nerves sent her service toss careening off target and her ranking into free fall. She's been picking up the pieces ever since.

Ivanovic once said that if you start thinking about walking down a flight of steps, you’re probably going to trip. I wondered at the time if she was speaking from experience. Even after she stormed back into the Top 5 in 2014, I don’t think anyone believed that, when it came to her confidence, she was completely out of the psychogical woods. At the start of this season, I wrote that one or two bad losses might send her game reeling again. Her first-round defeat at the Australian Open seemed to do just that.

To my eyes, Ivanovic didn’t look all that much more relaxed than normal inside Chatrier on Tuesday. Yes, she was well ahead on the scoreboard against Elina Svitolina, a woman she had beaten in all six matches they’d played. Yes, she was hitting well, controlling the rallies with her forehand, and, for the most part, putting her service toss in the right spot. But Ivanovic was still fidgeting in her chair on the sidelines and staring up at her player’s box when she lost a point. With a chance to hold late in the second set, she drilled a sitter overhead long, and on one of her match points, she double faulted.

Yet Ivanovic, nerves and all, bounced back from that double fault to finish with a confidently struck forehand pass for a 6-3, 6-2 victory, and her first trip to a Grand Slam semifinal since she won this tournament as a wide-eyed 19-year-old in 2008. It wasn’t just this hiatus that has made her run here such a surprise. Ivanovic came to this tournament with even lower expectations than normal in 2015. She arrived with a pedestrian 11-9 record on the season. The previous week, she had lost in the first round in Rome. Earlier in the month she split from her latest coach, and her third in three years, Dejan Petrovic. When she lost the opening set of her first-round match to a quality opponent, Yaroslava Shvedova, it looked like Ana was heading for an early exit in Paris.

A week and five wins later, there were still signs of disbelief from the press that Ivanovic hadn't said her good-byes yet. Here’s one of the questions she fielded on Tuesday:

“How pleased are you with yourself in terms of handling it mentally and emotionally, because you mentioned you’re a combustible person.”

“I really had to work at it,” said Ivanovic, who has been answering questions about her self-confidence for years.

It seems that the key this time was the lack of expectations that had been forced upon her by her poor start to the season. In 2014, Ivanovic came here on a high and went out early; in 2015, her lowered sights have helped her keep her eyes on the match at hand, rather than the ones that might be coming down the road.

“I haven’t had as many matches coming into this tournament as I probably had last year,” Ivanovic said. “Last year, I came [to Roland Garros] probably expecting to be this far in the tournament. Now I had to battle. First round I lost first set and was down and had to fight back.”

“I just tried to hang in there, just tried to execute.”

Three of Ivanovic’s five victories have come in three sets; the best of them was her win over No. 9 seed Ekaterina Makarova in a runaway 6-1 third set. It was her first Top 10 win of 2015, and a confidence-builder.

Watching her step around and rip forehand winners on the red clay that day, I remembered the Ivanovic who did the same thing all the way to the title at Roland Garros in 2008. She struggled with expectations even then. In the previous year’s final, against Justine Henin, she had a mini-meltdown, and not long after reaching No. 1 in 2008—and becoming, for a moment, the new face of the women’s game—she began a long spiral downward. It was a spiral that, at times, threatened to drown a promising career.

Since then, Ivanovic has been on a non-stop, seven-year quest for answers. She has hired and fired too many coaches and physical trainers to count. This week, though, she's flying solo, relatively speaking. The most vocal and noticeable member of her team, as the tabloids have pointed out, has been her soccer-playing boyfriend, Bastian Schweinsteiger. Yet she’s back where she began, in another big, late-round match on Chatrier.

For this tournament at least, it seems that Ivanovic, after getting so much advice from so many people for so long, has found the answer for herself.

If anyone had a rougher and more unsettled spring than Ana Ivanovic, it was Stan Wawrinka. In April, he separated from his wife, Ilham, after 10 years, and at the start of the French Open had gone just 7-6 since the beginning of March. His last match before Roland Garros was a loss to 74th-ranked Federico Delbonis in Geneva. And in his last match against his quarterfinal opponent today, Roger Federer, Wawrinka had been soundly beaten in straight sets in Rome. When it comes to the expectations game, Stan couldn’t have had a lot of them when he arrived in Paris.

Yet a week later, he has reached his first French Open semifinal in 11 tries, while dropping just one set. Wawrinka first began to fire his famously heavy baseline artillery in his straight-set blitz of Gilles Simon in the fourth round. And he kept firing in his 6-4, 6-3, 7-6 (4) win over Federer—just his third in 19 tries against his countryman—on Tuesday.

Ivanovic said she knew she had to fight from the first ball at Roland Garros this year; Wawrinka said he woke up this on this blustery morning and knew exactly what he had to do, too.

“It’s quite clear what I have to do in conditions like that, and when I play Roger,” Wawrinka said. “I need to play really heavy.”

If a song were to be written about Wawrinka’s win over his friend and teammate, it might be called, “He’s Heavy, He Ain’t My Brother.”

Wawrinka pounded the ball with sensational pace and depth; he won 111 points for the match, 43 of them on winners, including five in the concluding tiebreaker. He was especially dominant on serve—this was the first time that Federer failed to come up with a single service break in a Grand Slam match since 2002. Wawrinka won 44 of 50 first-serve points. The breeze kicked up the clay on Lenglen, but it couldn’t do anything to disrupt Wawrinka’s shots.

“I’m always really, really nervous before I play Roger,” said Wawrinka, who claimed that this was the best he had ever played on clay. “So I wasn’t really feeling good this morning before the match. But I also know that’s when I play my best in general, because I have no choice but to play well.”

“That’s why Roger was struggling, because I was playing so well.”

It’s tough to argue with that assessment. Wawrinka didn’t give Federer time to do anything but try to anticipate where he next bullet was going and make a desperate lunge for it. That didn’t work from the baseline, and it didn’t work at the net, either, where Federer was just 13 of 23.

Afterward, Federer said that his mind is already on Wimbledon. One thing he may—or may not—want to remember is how he returned serve in his last two losses on clay this season. He struggled mightily to win points on Wawrinka’s first serve today, and on Novak Djokovic’s first serve in their final in Rome.

Wawrinka, of course, stays on in Paris. When he came to the city, he didn't look like a serious contender; now he’s two matches from the title. If he plays the way he did today, would you be shocked if, once the world gets over watching Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, Stan stole away with the title?