Karen Khachanov reached the 1/8 finals of Roland Garros for the sixth time in his career

According to the results of the sixth day of the French Open, only one Russian tennis player remained in the men’s singles grid – Karen Khachanov, who coped in four sets with the Australian Tanasi Kokkinakis. In the 1/8 finals, he will play with the Italian Lorenzo Sonego, who, in turn, lost to Andrey Rublev, leading 2:0 in sets. For women, places in the fourth round were earned by last year’s semi-finalist, the ninth racket of the world Daria Kasatkina, the 2021 finalist Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Elina Avanesyan, who became the opening of the tournament. The correspondent of Kommersant watched the events in Paris Evgeny Fedyakov.

The end of this match was incredibly emotional. The winner, Karen Khachanov, fell to his knees with both hands thrown up in triumph. And the loser, Thanasi Kokkinakis, at that moment was lying on his back, using a racket instead of a pillow. Exhausted on Wednesday in a five-set meeting with the 2015 Roland Garros champion Swiss Stanislas Wawrinka, which lasted 4 hours and 38 minutes, the Australian again left all his strength on the court, but still lost to the Russian in 3 hours and 42 minutes. Although along the way, Khachanov had a very hard time.

Having taken the first two games, Khachanov then gave the third set, after which he lost 3:5 in the fourth, in the tenth game he played the set point, and on the tie-break he was 1:4 behind with two mini-breaks, but still did not allow Kokkinakis to finish the job up to the fifth batch.

This game took place on the court of Simon Mathieu, and on the court of Suzanne Lenglen, the larger arena where Andrei Rublev met with the Italian Lorenzo Sonego, 48th racket of the world and the owner of three titles of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), nevertheless came to a dramatic interchanges. Although there, for quite a long time, events developed according to a similar scenario. Rublev also played the serve in the fourth game and brought the matter to a tie-break, but, unlike Khachanov, he lost it. And in the fifth set everything was decided by a break made by Sonego in the eighth game on the serve of the Russian. As a result, last year’s quarter-finalist lost the match for the first time in his career, during which he led 2-0 in sets and, naturally, looked terribly upset during the press conference.

Thus, Karen Khachanov, for the third consecutive Grand Slam tournament, shows the best result among Russian men. At last year’s US Open and the Australian Open in January, he made it to the semi-finals, and now he has a good chance to reach the quarter-finals, where he already was in Paris in 2019. By the way, Khachanov performs very consistently at Roland Garros. He reached the 1/8 final stage there for the sixth time in the last seven years. “Sonego, of course, created a sensation by beating Andrei, but my coach and I will definitely watch fragments of this match in preparation,” a Russian who works with Croat Vedran Martic told a Kommersant correspondent.

The Friday program of Roland Garros turned out to be so full of matches with the participation of Russian players that one might think that not the third, but only the first round had begun.

Last year’s semi-finalist Daria Kasatkina solved her problem before anyone else, even before lunch.

Then, the finalist of the Paris Major 2021, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who returned from a knee injury, demonstrated enviable strong-willed qualities. Occupying only 333rd place in the world classification and getting into the main draw thanks to a protected rating, in a purely Russian confrontation, she broke the resistance of 21-year-old Anastasia Potapova, who is spending her best season and entrenched herself in the top thirty. Moreover, Pavlyuchenkova took the third set to zero.

And late in the evening another surprise was presented by Elina Avanesyan, who knocked out the Olympic champion Belinda Bencic from Switzerland on Monday. Now, not so titled, but still quite well-known young Dane Clara Tauson, who already has two victories in WTA tournaments and was among the top 40 tennis players in the world last season, fell under her hot hand. It will not remain without consequences. Avanesyan will make a very impressive jump in the rankings, where he will rise by at least 50 positions from his current 134th place. And soon the press service of the tournament issued information according to which tennis players in the status of lucky loser, that is, the losers of the qualifying finals, who fell into the main draw at the last moment due to injuries of other participants, were not in the 1/8 finals of Roland Garros for a very long time, since 1988.