Yesterday evening a beautiful sports page was recorded on the inaugural day of the 2023 edition of Roland Garros. Lucas Pouille, a talented French tennis player, fortunately seems to be recovering after a rather difficult period in which he suffered from depression and abused alcohol.
After winning his first-round match against Austria’s Yuri Rodionov, the 29-year-old felt heartwarming support from his crowd as he sang the Marseillaise, the French national anthem. A splendid moment, which involved all the fans in the stands, who paid tribute to him after the difficulties experienced in recent years.
In an interview with L’Equipe, the transalpine tennis player recently spoke of his dark period: “A career is like in normal life, you go through good times and more difficult times and it is important that people feel it too.
We always think that an athlete should be in perfect condition, but things don’t always go the way they should in life,” said the Frenchman, who later clarified: “Yes, I think you can define it as depression.
Since you spend time alone in your room and only see black, I think it is. Now it’s over, it’s behind me, even if sometimes I think about it. It serves me and gives me more strength than anything else.”
Lucas Pouille singing La Marseillaise (French National Anthem) with the Roland-Garros crowd on Court 14 to celebrate his first Grand Slam win in four years 🥲 pic.twitter.com/JhbvWZutfx
— Bastien Fachan (@BastienFachan) May 28, 2023
The day 1 in Paris
The world number four Stefanos Tsitsipas starts with the handbrake, at the Roland Garros 2023. The Greek tennis player starts with a break in the first set with a Jiri Vesely who does not give wonders, but unlike his opponent, he is not wrong.
However, the Czech tennis player, when he goes to serve for the first set, fails by losing only one point on serve. It seems like a story already written, but it’s always a Roland Garros match and Tsitsipas is a player who knows how to complicate life: in the third set, in the twelfth game, just one point to give his opponent not only a break, but also the set .
It is necessary for him to reach the tiebreak of the fourth set to close a tiring match: 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 7-6 was the final result. World number two Aryna Sabalenka wins against Marta Kostyuk: 6-3, 6-2 was the final result in favor of the Belarusian.
An uphill game for her, thanks to two double faults in a single game, which cost her the break. From that moment, however, the champion from Madrid leveled up and crushed the Ukrainian, who did not take advantage of some empty passes of the number two in the draw, especially in the first set. In the women’s circuit surprise of the day (but not so much) with Muchova’s victory over Maria Sakkari.