Elena Rybakina, the No. 21 seed from Kazakhstan, defeated the 23-time Grand Slam tournament winner in their fourth-round match, 6-3, 7-5.
PARIS — There is not much left of the main stadium where Serena Williams won her three French Open singles titles in 2002, 2013 and 2015.
It has been rebuilt and remodeled in recent years, adding a retractable roof and subtracting a great deal of direct connection with tennis history. It is an undeniably new era at Roland Garros, one in which Williams, 39, is no longer the overwhelming favorite, especially on the surface that least suits her power game.
A defeat on clay is no great surprise at this stage, even against a 21-year-old like Elena Rybakina, who had never been past the third round at a Grand Slam event until this tournament.
But the 21st-seeded Rybakina seized the moment on Sunday, often overpowering Williams in her 6-3, 7-5 victory in the fourth round on the main Philippe Chatrier Court.
She had never played Williams, but like all the young and talented players on tour, Rybakina has long had a connection with her, the player who was a dominant force long before they joined the tour.
“I was watching her matches on TV, so many Grand Slams,” Rybakina said, referring to tournament titles.
Williams has won 23 singles titles. That is one short of Margaret Court’s career record, and she has been one short for more than four years now. She seems increasingly far from finishing off her quest.
Wimbledon, which starts in three weeks, still looks like her best chance: a place where her remarkable serve, big returns and penetrating groundstrokes can still do major damage.
“I’m kind of excited to switch surfaces,” Williams said. “Historically I have done pretty well on grass. I have done pretty well on clay, too, just not this particular season.”
But the younger generation is rising on all surfaces and increasingly unintimidated by the great Williams, despite all her shrieks and roars and trophies. Rybakina looked like she might crack when she lost her serve at 4-3 in the second set, but then quickly stabilized. To watch Williams round by round at this stage is to realize that every match can turn into a perilous adventure. That knowledge emboldens the opposition, and it reassured Rybakina, who was born and raised in Moscow but now represents Kazakhstan, in part, because of the financial support that country’s tennis federation has been able to offer.
“It’s difficult to expect anything, because you watch on TV and that’s completely different when you come on court and you feel the power and everything,” Rybakina said of Williams. “I knew that the serve was going to be difficult for me to return. She’s powerful, but I was ready. Then after a few points, I felt it comfortable, so nothing.”
In fact, the most dominant server on Sunday was not the seventh-seeded Williams. Rybakina’s average first serve speed was faster than Williams’s: 106.6 miles per hour to 105.3. Her average second serve speed was faster, too: 85.4 to 85.
She hit four aces to Williams’s two, and more important, if you are searching for the bottom line, she won 69 percent of her first-serve points to Williams’s 59 percent and 52 percent of her second-serve points to Williams’s paltry 41 percent.
Those numbers do not mislead, and though Williams is rightly lauded for her ability to disguise the location of her serve, she often looked more bamboozled by Rybakina’s delivery.
Williams also found herself at quite a distance from many of Rybakina’s groundstroke winners and lost the majority of the quick-strike points of four shots or fewer.
“We watched matches of Serena, of course,” Rybakina said of her game plan, made with her coach, Stefano Vukov. “We tried to make her play from the backhand side more, just because she has an open stance. With an open stance and two hands, it’s difficult to move the ball, so I tried to attack this side. Sometimes I was stuck too much to the forehand. That’s why I was losing points, because the forehand it’s better not to even play there, it’s so good.”
But not everything is as good as it used to be, including Williams’s movement. Serving at 4-4, she lost the first point when she retreated to the baseline and tried to get out of the way of a Rybakina backhand only to have it hit her racket frame. Williams looked mortified, bent forward at the waist and leaned on her racket for 10 seconds or more.
“She plays aggressive, but also, I mean, it’s difficult for her now also after she has a baby and everything,” Rybakina said. “So I had to step in and just try to move and get some shorter balls to finish the point.”
Williams has had some remarkable success since returning to the tour in 2018 after the birth of her daughter, Olympia. She reached the final of Wimbledon and the United States Open later that year and did the same in 2019. The bar is so high for Williams, but she has stopped reaching the same heights, particularly in Paris, where she has not been past the fourth round since her comeback.
This was her second Roland Garros at this age, 39. Last year, when the tournament was delayed until October, she withdrew before the second round because of an Achilles’ tendon injury suffered at the U.S. Open. This year she won three rounds, which felt rather like a triumph for those who watched her struggle on clay in Italy last month.
“I’m in a much better place than when I got here,” Williams said. “It had been a really difficult season for me on the clay, and although I love the clay, I was like, ‘If I could just win a match.’”
She continues to love Paris, too, a city where she has long had an apartment on the Left Bank, even if she has not been able to stay there with her family during the last two French Opens because of tournament rules during the pandemic.
Williams speaks some French and will always have three French Open singles titles and two French Open doubles titles. But those glory days on the clay look as much a part of the past at Roland Garros as all the buildings and courts that no longer exist.
Bring on Wimbledon, where traditions die harder, but Williams, who does not intend to play a warm-up tournament on grass, had better hurry if she wants to crank back the clock to reach 24.
The younger generation’s time has come.
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