Back on the French Open court that undid her a year ago, Mirra Andreeva is growing up

PARIS — Mirra Andreeva knows that the tennis moments that can undo her are going to come.

She might start missing. Her opponent might suddenly get hot. The crowd might start railing against her.

How Andreeva — so talented, so young, and sometimes so not ready for the swirling intensity of a tennis match — manages those moments, will likely make the difference between fulfilling her potential and wondering about what could have been.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work the best way, but I have the plan in my head that I’m trying, you know, to have if something doesn’t go according to the plan,” she said Sunday in a news conference, after reaching the French Open quarterfinals for the third consecutive time.

For over a year, Andreeva has had a first-world tennis problem. Winning two of the more prestigious tournaments in the sport at 17 proved to be one of the worst parts of her career so far.

In one month, she went from being an ascendant star, to being fixed in the tennis firmament as a favorite, expected to deliver on that status week in, week out.

Since March 2025, in which she won the Dubai Tennis Championships and the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., 16 of Andreeva’s 20 losses have come against players ranked lower than her. She has been a top-10 player since then, so she’s almost always playing someone ranked lower, but the 19-year-old is still undergoing the sporting and mental transition that every rising player does.

Learning how to be the favorite, who plays under the pressure of expectation, instead of how to be the underdog, who plays with the freedom of the unexpected, can make plenty of players vulnerable against an inferior foe at the business end of a tournament. At this year’s French Open, these pressure dynamics are especially heavy. Both draws will crown a first-time champion, and there are just four top-10 seeds — three women and one man — left in the tournament.

Andreeva is one of them. She is back where she was 12 months ago, a prohibitive favorite in the quarterfinals, after a near-perfect 6-3, 6-2 win over Jil Teichmann of Switzerland in the fourth round. She faces Sorana Cîrstea, the 36-year-old world No. 18 from Romania, for a spot in the semifinals. Cîrstea is playing the best tennis of her life, during what she says is her final year on tour. But already Andreeva has achieved things and shown promise in a way that most players, Cîrstea included, cannot.

Last year in this spot, when Andreeva met French wild card Loïs Boisson in the quarterfinals, things got ugly. She led 5-3 in the opening set, before Boisson saved a set point and used the confidence from it to steal a tiebreak. Andreeva, still very much in the match, smacked a ball away in anger.

This roused the Court-Philippe-Chatrier crowd, and in the second set Andreeva fully unraveled, smacking another ball to the rafters and asking people in her box to leave. Her tennis became both tight and loose, pushing and passive one point and spraying errors the next. Boisson won at a canter.

“Sometimes I was a bit emotional,” Andreeva said in a news conference afterward.

She has spent the past week trying to replace those memories with better ones. On the opening day of the tournament, she returned to the scene of the meltdown when organizers made Andreeva an opening-day match on Court Philippe-Chatrier against another Frenchwoman, Fiona Ferro. No such luck.

“I was hoping that the stadium wouldn’t be too full, too packed today, because obviously that would have been a little bit harder,” Andreeva said in a news conference after her routine 6-3. 6-3 win.

In 2025, Boisson was just the start of Andreeva’s year of heartbreak. An agonizing defeat to Belinda Bencic, then the world No. 35, in the Wimbledon quarterfinals. A close one against Sonay Kartal, then the world No. 81, in the round of 16 at the China Open. This year’s Australian Open fourth round against Elina Svitolina, which Andreeva entered as maybe the best player in the tournament and which she left on the losing side. And then an ignominious end to her Indian Wells title defense, which saw her cursing at the crowd after a tense, tetchy loss to Kateřina Siniaková in her second match.

Given all that data, trouble loomed again at last month’s Madrid Open.

In the round of 16, she nearly blew a 5-1 third-set lead against world No. 58 Anna Bondár, before eking out the win in the tiebreak. She was chattering at her box as the lead slipped, saying things like “I’m not a champion,” to her coach, Conchita Martinez, and announcing to the world that she was going to “choke.”

Instead, she won.

Then she had to face Hailey Baptiste, who had upset Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1, in the semifinals. That made Andreeva the highest-ranked player in the final four.

Andreeva won that too, just as Baptiste was threatening to force a deciding set that would have tested her nerve.

After beating the American, Andreeva said in her news conference that she hadn’t thought about the expectations.

“I just told myself that it wouldn’t matter who I would play against. I would just try to make my opponent’s life very complicated if she wants to beat me, and, you know, and if she beats me, then, OK, I will just try to be proud and shake her hand and say, ‘OK, good job. You earned the win and there’s nothing else I can do,’” she said.

In the final, against a white-hot Kostyuk, Andreeva never got into the first set and then frittered a lead in the second. But her resolve to keep her emotions in check in big and small moments is being built for a far bigger horizon.

Martinez does and doesn’t have time for Andreeva’s meltdowns. Before the Indian Wells final last year, with Andreeva tight and snapping at her team, Martinez told her to stop acting like a brat. She promptly beat Sabalenka to win the biggest title of her career.

There’s been a lot of petulant behavior during the past year, during the losses and sometimes the wins, and Martinez is still sitting in the box.

She declined to be interviewed for this story, but she said a year ago that she knows what it’s like to be a teenager in the top 10, with everyone expecting wonders. That was her in the late 1980s.

Martinez has worked hard, with mixed results, to teach Andreeva not to focus too hard on the negatives. Andreeva can hit eight beautiful shots in practice, then mess up the ninth, and beat herself up for the mistake.

Martinez is constantly telling her that, to survive in the sport, she is going to have to focus more on the sweet moments and the beautiful shots she can create, on and off the court, both in practice and during matches.

Andreeva listens and nods, then returns to self-hate too often. Her mother, Raisi, moved Mirra and her sister Erika when they were young children from Siberia, to Sochi, in Russia’s far more temperate southwest, and then to France, so they could fulfil her dream and theirs and pursue tennis. She travels with Mirra, and is almost always courtside at her matches. When the petulance becomes too much, she exits.

No parent wants to endure again what Raisi did last year during the Boisson match, when Andreeva got so annoyed with the world that she waved off her mother, telling her to leave, in front of a worldwide television audience and a packed stadium.

A year later, Andreeva thinks she has some tools to prevent a reprise. She and her psychologist have come up with them.

When the negative thoughts stir, she imagines a big, red stop sign in a road. She focuses on her breath. She will begin to sing a song in her head, nothing particular, whatever earworms have crawled in during the day. She believes it will help, as the process of going from underdog to favorite whirs along and she undergoes another process that she does not particularly want to have to experience.

“I don’t want to be old, and I don’t want to grow up,” she said during a news conference in Madrid. “I want to just stay 18 and be a kid all the time. I feel like, obviously lately, I just feel like time is going so fast, and I’m already going to turn 19.”

Ageing can bring some wisdom, though. When she lets her emotions out, her energy level drops and her tennis slackens. The more she can find a way to keep them inside, the better she focuses on the next point, rather than something bad that has just happened.

Andreeva has always been a perfectionist, sometimes to her benefit, often to her detriment. She is trying to see both the good and the less good in her play, almost from above and. no matter what she is feeling, keep it mostly inside.

She gets it. Now she’s trying to live it. Day by day, whether she likes it or not, Andreeva is growing up.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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