When will Naomi Osaka play her first round at 2024 Roland Garros?

Naomi Osaka

• Seed: Unseeded
• Career-Best Ranking: 1
• Age: 26
• Career Titles: 7
• Grand Slam Titles: 4 — US Open (2018, 2020); Australian Open (2019, 2021)

When will Osaka play her Roland Garros first round?

Osaka is set to return to Roland Garros on Sunday, May 26, the opening day of the tournament. She'll face Italy's Lucia Bronzetti in the first round.

The four-time Grand Slam champion is playing the clay-court major for the first time since 2022 after giving birth last year.

How has Osaka performed in 2024 so far?

Osaka's return from maternity leave has slowly been gaining steam. The former No. 1 missed all of the 2023 season after announcing her pregnancy last January, and gave birth to her daughter Shai, last July.

She made her comeback in January, and has posted a 12-9 record in nine tournaments this year. After starting just 1-3, Osaka's form picked up beginning in Doha, where she reached the quarterfinals.

Other highlights included third rounds in Indian Wells and Miami, and a fourth-round effort in Rome, where she defeated two Top 20 players: Marta Kostyuk and Daria Kasatkina before losing to Australian Open finalist Zheng Qinwen.

Osaka's effort in Rome marked the first time she'd won back-to-back matches on clay, her least-preferred surface, in four years.

"I think I definitely feel a lot more confident leaving than when I came," she said after losing to Zheng.

Where did Osaka land in the 2024 Roland Garros draw?

Osaka landed in the top half of the draw, and as an unseeded player, can be the second-round opponent for world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, the three-time Roland Garros champion. To get there, she'll have to first have to defeat the 25-year-old Italian, ranked No. 48, who won the WTA 250 clay-court event on Rabat, Morocco last year. But Bronzetti's title defense ended in the quarterfinals on Friday at the hands of American Peyton Stearns, who came from 5-0 down in the third set (and saved a match point) to win 6-4, 4-6, 7-5.

Looking ahead to Osaka's potential eye-popping second round against Swiatek, the two major champions have only played twice, and only on hard courts. Osaka, then No. 2, beat an 18-year-old Swiatek, then ranked No. 65, in the third round of the 2019 Rogers Cup, 7-6(4), 6-4. The roles were reversed three years later, when Swiatek, on the eve of becoming world No. 1 for the first time, defeated 77th-ranked Osaka in the final in Miami, 6-4, 6-0.