PARIS—Every year we say the women’s draw is more wide open than ever. Every year we have to amend that statement and assure ourselves that, no, this time it’s really wide open, that anyone can win, that we’ve never seen anything like this before. The French Open has traditionally been the widest of them all, mainly because you can’t just pick Serena and be done with it. This time, though, another great player has saved Roland Garros from total unpredictability and disorder. Kim Clijsters may be hurting, she may be rusty, she may pick up a racquet for the first time in a month a few seconds before she walks onto center court, but she’s still the winner of the last two majors. She is, if not the favorite, a player who, if she can find something like her best form, should win. You couldn’t have said that if Kim hadn’t entered the draw.
But one fan’s chaos is another player’s, or many other players’, opportunity. From Wozniacki to Azarenka to Kvitova to Sharapova right on down to Julia Goerges, this is a tournament ripe for the taking, by someone who has never even come close to winning it before. Is there a Dr. Schiavone in the house in Paris? Let’s see who stands a chance of making anything possible again.
First Quarter
Caroline Wozniacki comes to this tournament, if not over-tennised, then extremely tennised. She went ahead, after back to back weeks in Madrid and Rome, and played in Brussels, right up to the doorstep of the French Open. Word of advice: Jelena Jankovic’s Slam preparation regimen might not be the one to follow.
Not that Wozniacki has all that much to worry about. She gets Date-Krumm in the first round, and the highest seed near her is Svetlana Kuznetsova, who, based on current form, won’t even get close to reaching their potential match-up in the fourth round.
It does get tougher on the other side of this quarter. There’s Sam Stosur, runner-up in Paris a year ago and in Rome a week ago, and Goerges, two-time winner over Wozniacki this spring and champ in Stuttgart. There’s also Marion Bartoli—make of that what you will.
Semifinalist: Wozniacki
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Second Quarter
Talk about wide open, talk about opportunity. A quarter in which the top two seeds are Vera Zvonareva and Francesca Schiavone is going to produce one of the semifinalists for the French Open. This is something that should make all of the players here, from 2010 semifinalist Jelena Jankovic to the surging Bethanie Mattek-Sands to the occasionally dangerous Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova to the perpetually injured Sabine Lisicki, take heart.
Semfinalist: Mattek-Sands
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Third Quarter
There are two names that stick out in this section: Victoria Azarenka’s and Petra Kvitova’s. Each has won a Premier Mandatory event this year, and each has the type of hit-through-the-court game that can win on clay. Each is also a volatile performer from one day to the next and liable to go off the boil at a moment’s notice. Azarenka is the more experienced player—she’s been to a quarterfinal here—but Kvitova, in the long run, probably has the bigger upside. Now it's a question of when we’ll start to see how far it will take her.
Also here: Ivanovic, Li Na, Cibulkova, and U.S. hope of the moment, Sloane Stephens.
Semfinalist: Azarenka
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Fourth Quarter
The bottom section is, on paper, the toughest. Kim Clijsters, the world’s best player at the moment, is here, as is Maria Sharapova, a three-time Slammer who is a threat once again. Trying to head off their quarterfinal collision will be Petkovic, Wickmayer, Radwanska, a who’s who of the WTA’s second tier.
Will Clijsters be ready? She should, in theory, be able to play off her rust in the first few rounds. And while she’s missed time, it likely hasn’t bothered her all that much. This is the tournament, in her mind, the one she wants the most, the one she thinks she should own, all these years after her 12-10 in the third, final-round loss to Jennifer Capriati. If Kim is playing well, feeling fit, and not hustling herself off the court in a hurricane of errors, she should get it.
Semifinalist: Clijsters
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Semifinals: Wozniacki d. Mattek-Sands; Clijsters d. Azarenka
Final: Clijsters d. Wozniacki
Champion: Kim Clijsters