29/05/2012 00:45 CEST - Rassegna internazionale

Azarenka trema ma si salva (New York Times)

So Victoria, how is your French?

Rotten, Victoria Azarenka admitted, sitting in the safety of an armchair after a dangerous match. “But I understand a lot. I am still really shy to speak. I’m picking it up, and I listen and I understand more. I can write better. It’s easier for me to think it through, but to speak is still difficult. But I’m young. I can catch up.”

Still, there were moments on Monday, quite a few in fact, when it appeared that Azarenka would not get the chance to work on any more French or tennis at Roland Garros this spring.

Seeded No.1 at a Grand Slam tournament for the first time at this French Open, the tall, powerful Belarussian came perilously close to becoming the first women’s top seed to lose in the opening round here since 1925. Though she took an early 2-0 lead in the late morning sunshine on Court Philippe Chatrier, she soon found herself out of sorts and down a set, 0-4 and break point to a flashy Italian journeywoman, Alberta Brianti.

Falling behind a set and 0-5 might have made a major upset just about inevitable, even though Brianti, ranked just 105th at age 32, had shown no previous inclinations to create shock waves in major tournaments.

But Azarenka, still tempestuous but no longer overwrought when confronted with her own tennis imperfections, proceeded to rear back and, suspect right shoulder and all, smack an ace on the line with her second serve.

If the ball had bounced another centimeter or two to the left, she might have been booking a flight to Minsk or Monte Carlo instead of her next practice court in Paris. But she held serve and proceeded to win six straight games to even the match at one set apiece and ultimately prevail 6-7 (6-8), 6-4, 6-2.

“Sometimes I felt it was not my day,” she said. “Sometimes I thought, yeah, maybe I still fight. I still have a chance. Sometimes it was like, you know what? Forget it. I don’t want to do it. But the important thing in that really miserable, if you can say, moment, is I stay strong, and I just went for my shots. I just went for what I had to do, and I didn’t do before.

“That shows a little bit of not losing courage, I guess.”

The French Open has become a home tournament of sorts for Azarenka. She is now based in French-speaking Monaco after leaving her training base in the United States. She began working with the French coach Sam Sumyk in 2010, and her physical therapist Jean-Pierre Bruyère, her sparring partner Julien Jeanpierre and her new star adviser, the former world No. 1 Amélie Mauresmo, also are French. All this explains Azarenka’s crash course in the language, even if most members of the team have a global outlook and, in most cases, home addresses outside of France.

“French connection? That’s a good movie,” Sumyk said. “Seriously, that’s why we are smiling when we see or hear or read about the French connection. Of course we are French, but we feel like citizens of the world a little bit. It’s weird to say that but we feel like, I don’t know, this is not really a French team.”

Sumyk, a modest club player in his youth in Brittany, left for Florida in his 20s and eventually began coaching Meilen Tu, the former tour player from the United States who is now his wife and Azarenka’s agent. He and Tu live in Calabasas, California, north of Los Angeles. Bruyère lives outside London. Mauresmo, like many present and former French tennis stars, resides officially in Switzerland.

But Monte Carlo is now the hub in the spinning wheel of Azarenka’s peripatetic life. She and her team gather there or, more often than not, elsewhere. They spent Christmas in Dubai with her boyfriend, the tennis player Sergei Bubka Jr., and his father Sergei Bubka, the former world-champion pole vaulter from Ukraine.

“This lifestyle is really difficult, but it’s also really interesting,” Azarenka said in an interview on Monday. “I don’t know on the part of being a coach, but as a player you can only appreciate those people who travel with you so much and they just kind of dedicate their life to you. So that’s really something that you cannot say thank you with words.”