Arthur Fils takes Hamburg "dogfight", Zheng Qinwen triumphs ahead of Paris Olympics

Top tennis players are well versed in how to prepare for Grand Slam events. They do it four times each season, and the tour’s schedules put them on the right surfaces in the weeks leading up to each major.

Preparing for the Olympic Games? That’s not something they have to think about often. They do it once every four years, and the schedule doesn’t give them any help. This year the pros will come straight from Wimbledon grass and go back to Roland Garros clay. Most Olympic athletes spend half their lives getting ready for their shining moment, but tennis players pretty much have to wing it when they get there.

Still, that doesn’t mean they can’t create a little momentum for themselves in the weeks leading up to the Games. That’s what a few of them did this weekend. Suddenly, red-clay reps were paramount, and the few, straggling events on that surface that follow Wimbledon meant a lot more than they usually do.

And a few prominent, enthusiastic contenders ended up making the most of them. Arthur Fils, who will lead the French contingent in Paris, and Zheng Qinwen, winner of the Asian Games last year, both won titles. Rafael Nadal, master of Roland Garros; Alexander Zverev, the defending men’s gold medalist; and Karolina Muchova, finalist in Paris in 2023, all made finals. Which of them did the most for their medal chances?

Fils will be among the more intriguing figures at the Games. He’s 20, he’s ultra-athletic, he’s been touted as the future of French tennis, and it looks like he’s peaking at the right time. His 500-level title in Hamburg was the biggest of his young career so far, and his win over Zverev in the final may have been his most impressive victory.

It came over a Top 5 player, who was also the defending champ and hometown favorite. It took three and a half hours of brutal baseline play. It required overcoming cramps that forced him to resort to an underhand serve at a crucial late stage in the match, and keeping his cool when Zverev expressed his annoyance about that tactic. It ended with Fils raising his game above the more-experienced Zverev’s in the winner-take-all final-set tiebreak.

“I knew it was going to be just a fight, like a dogfight,” Fils said. “You just have to fight until the last point, until the last ball. I think that I’m practicing since a long time for this kind of moment so I’m really happy to win it.”

Now Fils just has to find a way to match that performance in front of the home fans at Roland Garros. He’s 0-2 there so far, and the pressure on him will be all the greater at the Olympics.

As for Zverev, Hamburg may have been a double-edged sword. By making the final, he showed that he’s still in form on clay, and by coming back from a set down to nearly beat Fils, he showed that he can still find his way back in matches it looks like he should lose. But he also went out in his second straight final, after Roland Garros. Will he wonder about his ability to close the big matches next week?

“The level was so far from what it should be,” Nadal said after his one-sided loss to Nuno Borges in the Bastad final. “Probably the energy, too.”

Was Rafa being a little too hard on himself? After all, the 38-year-old had won two long three-setters the previous two days, and beaten a quality opponent in Cam Norrie the round before that. Making your first final in two years can’t be all bad, right?

But Rafa has never had runner-up goals, especially on clay, so you can’t expect him to start now. That’s doubly true when he has his sights set on a second singles gold medal, and a second doubles gold, with Carlos Alcaraz, in Paris.

It’s hard to judge where Rafa is, level-wise. As I said, he looked good for stretches in Bastad. He found another gear against Norrie, and he fought well in his marathon wins over much younger opponents. But none of those matches came against Top 20 competition.

“It has been a long week with long matches,” he said. “But I was not able to feel myself comfortable enough during the whole week to be satisfied with the week of tennis that I played.”

Bastad, which Rafa hadn’t played in 19 years, would have been a success for an aging athlete making a farewell tour. But maybe not for someone who wants to win gold, against the sport’s top players, in a few days.

If you’re looking for Olympic dark horses on the women’s side, Zheng Qinwen and Karolina Muchova will likely be among the leading candidates. Both have made Grand Slam finals—Zheng in Melbourne this year, Muchova in Paris last year. Both have been in the Top 10. Both like clay. And both have taken a set from the prohibitive Olympic favorite, Iga Swiatek, at Roland Garros.

Zheng and Muchova also both made the final in Palermo on Sunday. Zheng, who defended her title with a three-set win, was the more powerful hitter and explosive player, and the match was mostly on her racquet. She earned 19 break points, and converted seven of them.

But if you’re grading on a match-play curve, you would have to say that Muchova was also a winner. This was just her third tournament since coming back from a wrist injury that had kept her off the tour since last year’s US Open. She showed an ability to adjust and disrupt Zheng with her shot repertoire, but couldn’t stay with her down the stretch.

Muchova will go to Paris with a strong Czech team that includes two major champions in Barbora Krejcikova and Marketa Vondrousova. Zheng will go with the backing of a super-power nation that prioritizes the Games. Will that be a spur or a burden? That’s a question every player will confront as they put on their country’s colors and wing it next week in Paris.