Garcia enters home stretch of career with rollercoaster win in Cincinnati
If you thought that the home stretch of Caroline Garcia's career might make for a calmer ride than the edge-of-your-seat nailbiters the Frenchwoman has put her fans through for over a decade, it didn't take long for her to set you right at the Cincinnati Open.
Cincinnati: Scores | Draws | Order of play
Garcia, the 2022 champion competing as a wild card this year, pulled through 5-7, 6-4, 6-3 in 2 hours and 36 minutes, but -- as ever -- the scoreline barely tells half the story. There was a lightning-fast start which belied the 31-year-old's lack of on-court action since Roland Garros; there were swashbuckling volleys which, at full stretch, she managed to carve delicately just over the net, and there was no-holds-barred power to which Kartal had little answer. Sound familiar?
There were also inexplicably blown leads, misses by metres just when she seemed on top of the match and games that oscillated wildly between error and winner. That also sounds familiar. Garcia lost the first set from 3-0, 40-0 up; led 5-2 in the second set before requiring four set points to get over the line; then finally seized control with a relatively straightforward decider. She will next face No. 11 seed and 2023 runner-up Karolina Muchova, whom she defeated 6-7(3), 7-5, 6-4 in their only previous encounter at Doha 2023.
On a day that fellow victor Taylor Townsend would later describe as "hot as hell," Garcia admitted in her on-court interview that she had wondered what she was doing out there.
"For a couple of minutes that was going on in my head," she said. "It was so hot, so tough out there, I didn't play a lot of matches in the last couple of months. At the end of the first set I was exhausted. I felt like I let my opportunity go away, and it was a long way to the end of the match. But for some reason I got a lot of support from my team and the people here, and I wanted to try to the end."
Garcia has received a wild card for this month's US Open, which will be the final tournament of her career.
Despite the soaring temperatures and humidity, two early matches passed the three-hour mark. Qualifier Leolia Jeanjean took 3 hours and 5 minutes to notch the first completed tour-level hard-court win of her career, coming from 3-0 down in the decider to defeat Yuliia Starodubtseva 7-5, 1-6, 6-4. Meanwhile, Lucia Bronzetti saved one match point in the third-set tiebreak to triumph in the third-longest WTA main-draw match of 2025 so far, overcoming Zhu Lin 6-7(6), 6-2, 7-6(6) in 3 hours and 27 minutes. At 6-6 in the deciding tiebreak, the Italian delivered a spectacular forehand winner down the line to end a 19-stroke lungbuster.