In the stands, with generous views of the Center Court, Andrey Shevchenko, legendary former Ukrainian footballer, watches the women’s final.
Perhaps this is an exercise in journalism-fiction, but it is possible that Shevchenko had requested access three days ago, on the eve of the semifinal between her compatriot, Elina Svitolina, the Ukrainian mother who denies greetings to the Belarusian rivals, and Marketa Vondrousova.
Maybe.
The fact is that Svitolina does not play in the final, touched and sunk in the semifinal, and Shevchenko must settle for watching the military parade of Vondrousova (24), the Czech lefty who has been breaking all the forecasts (she is the first tournament champion to she was not listed as a seed) until she emulated her compatriots Sukova, Mandlikova, Navratilova (when she won the All England she was American, although she was born in Prague), Novotna or Karolina Pliskova, champions at Wimbledon, like her.
(…)
When everything is over, Ons Jabeur (28) looks for his bench and buries his face under the towel and wants to die.
Jabeur is the sports soul of the new African sport, something like the first African woman tennis player in everything.
The first in the Top-50 of the WTA. The first to win a title. The first in a Grand Slam final (last year, right here).
The first African champion of a big?
Not yet.
Africa must wait.
Now, Ons Jabeur is without a voice. When everything is over, after 1h20m of the game, he loses, collapses and cries.
And when Annabel Croft gives him the floor, Jabeur barely manages to say:
This is one of the hardest moments of my life. It is the hardest loss of my life.
And her speech touches the British parish, it also touches Croft, the speaker, who had been a notable tennis player in the 1970s and 1980s and who was widowed a few months ago (her husband had been the victim of dizzying cancer).
In the guest box, Karim Kamoun contemplates Ons Jabeur. He is the tennis player’s husband and coach, and he watches as her wife writhes in sadness and only waits for everything to end to comfort her.
The match has been a bad adventure for Jabeur, a tennis player who carries the weight of a curse. He has played three Grand Slam finals. All three he has lost.
Vondrousova, surprising finalist at Roland Garros in 2019, stretches out her arm and wraps the ball, and Jabeur, an orthodox tennis player, an impeccable product of the unknown Tunisian school, trembles and shudders, as if she were afraid, as if she were cold.
Vondrousova is presumed to be the outsider.
He is not seeded. She is barely 42nd in the world today. She barely sports a single title in her career. She has never offered flashy moments. And yet she has grown up these days in London.
Along the way, she has been knocking down more than notable rivals (Kudermetova, Vekic, Buzkova, Pegula and Svitolina, the Ukrainian) and now, in the final, her left is a hammer that chains four games in a row to take over the first se, and thus it overwhelms Jabeur, a hypothetical favourite, who melts under the weight of a continent.
