PARIS — For more than three hours on Friday, Rafael Nadal and Alexander Zverev extended rallies and sets far beyond the norm. Égalité, the French word for deuce, began to sound more like a mantra than the score as the chair umpire kept repeating it, game after game.
But then suddenly this French Open semifinal, which looked set to run and run, came to an abrupt and very painful halt as Zverev, the tall and lanky German star, rolled his right ankle chasing a Nadal forehand late in the second set.
Zverev screamed, released his racket and tumbled to the red clay. He was soon carted off the Philippe Chatrier Court in a wheelchair for treatment. Several minutes later, he reappeared on crutches with his eyes red from crying and Nadal by his side, and announced he could not continue with Nadal leading, 7-6 (8), 6-6.
Nadal, already a 13-time French Open champion, is back in the final at Roland Garros, but this is not the way he wanted to celebrate victory on his 36th birthday.
“Being in the final of Roland Garros one more time is a dream without a doubt,” Nadal said in his on-court interview. “But at the same time, to finish that way, I have been there in the small room with Sascha before we came back on court, and to see him crying there is a very tough moment. So just all the best to him and all the team.”
On Sunday, Nadal, who is seeded just fifth this year, will face the winner of Friday’s second semifinal between No. 8 Casper Ruud and No. 20 Marin Cilic. Neither Ruud nor Cilic has been in a French Open final, or even a French Open semifinal, until their runs here on the much more welcoming bottom half of the men’s draw.
But Nadal managed to come through the gantlet in the top half, needing five sets to defeat Felix Auger-Aliassime in the fourth round and four sets to defeat No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the quarterfinals on Tuesday night. Zverev had played some of his finest and gutsiest tennis in his quarterfinal victory over the 19-year-old Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, and was another big hurdle for Nadal, all the more so under a closed center court roof.
The lack of wind is an advantage to a huge server like Zverev, and at 6-foot-6, he has one of the best first serves in the game. He had beaten Nadal in three of their four previous encounters, two of them indoors.
But Zverev, now 25 and for all his evident talent and firepower, has yet to beat Nadal or the other members of the Big Three — Djokovic and Roger Federer — in a Grand Slam tournament where singles matches are best-of-five sets instead of best-of-three.