The 2026 edition of Roland Garros will have an unprecedented champion. The early departure of Novak Djokovic This Friday left the tournament without tennis players with Mammoth Slam titles in competition, a scenario that ended up taking shape after the surprising victory of the Brazilian Joao Fonseca over the Serbian in the third round of the Parisian competition.
Fonseca, ranked 30th in the world ranking and just 19 years old, signed the most important victory of his career by winning by 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5 and 7-5 after 4 hours and Fifty three minutes of play. The Brazilian managed to recover from a two-object disadvantage to eliminate one of the greatest references in tennis and advance to the round of 16.
The match was played under high temperatures and in front of nearly 15,000 spectators, many of them identified with the colors of Brazil. The young South American took a while to find his best level and suffered during the first two sets, especially due to difficulties with his serve and errors made from the backhand.
Djokovic, 39 years old and winner of 24 Mammoth Slam titlestook advantage of that hesitant start to win the first two rounds by the same score of 6-4. However, the development of the match began to change from the third plot, when Fonseca increased the aggressiveness of his game and found in his powerful forehand a tool to take control of the exchanges.
A historic comeback and doubts about the future
The Brazilian’s reaction coincided with a visible physical wear and tear on the Belgrade tennis player. During several passages of the meeting, Djokovic resorted to ice packs to combat the heat and showed signs of physical discomfort, in addition to expressing discomfort about the atmosphere generated from the stands.
Fonseca kept the pressure on in decisive moments. In the fourth set he managed to save two plot balls when he was 3-4 down and later reversed a critical situation when Djokovic was two points away from closing the match. The Brazilian equalized the overall score after winning the plot 7-5.
The fifth round also required a new comeback. Down 1-3, Fonseca regained ground and broke his rival’s serve again. Both were evenly matched in the final stretch, but it was the Brazilian who took advantage of the opportunity to break the Serb’s serve in the eleventh game and then seal the victory with his serve.
The result left several statistical marks. Djokovic has not been eliminated so early at Roland Garros since 2009 and had never before lost a Mammoth Slam match against an opponent under the age of 20. Furthermore, for only the second time in large tournaments he missed a match after having won the first two objects, something that had not happened since the quarterfinals of Roland Garros 2010 against the Austrian Jurgen Melzer.
After the defeat, The Serbian avoided confirming whether he will compete again in the French tournament. Asked if this had been his last participation at Roland Garros, he responded with a brief: “I don’t know.”
“All the credit to Joao, he scored incredible points and played better than me in the key moments, in the fourth and fifth plot,” declared Djokovic, who also acknowledged that “he ran out of gas” in the last two rounds.
The former world number one also praised his rival. “He is very professional from what I have seen so far in the couple of years he has been on the circuit, that is a well-known condition for talent to be successful.”
“He has tremendous playing power and the entire Brazilian nation cheering him on. So there is a lot of expectation around him and rightly so,” he concluded.
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