PARIS — Mirra Andreeva is heading to the French Open final.
On a breezy, cool day in Paris, the 19-year-old Russian took advantage of a tight and nervous version of Marta Kostyuk, the 23-year-old from Ukraine who had not lost a match in more than two months.
Andreeva did what quality players do when they see an opponent decomposing 80 feet away. She kept her foot on the gas, kept the ball in the court and cruised to a 6-1, 6-3 win in just shy of 80 minutes.
For nearly five weeks of the clay-court season, Kostyuk appeared to have finally blossomed into the the fully-formed star she seemed destined to become when she started winning matches on the WTA Tour eight years ago.
She had a command of the ball and her emotions in a way she had never had before. As her country, Ukraine, continues to be attacked by Russian forces, she has spoken about the meaning of her victories, her hopes for her country and the tennis dreams she was finally fulfilling. Kostyuk, no matter the result in Paris Thursday, had grown up.
On Thursday though, the teenage Andreeva was the adult on the court, at least in pure tennis terms. She sloughed off some early nerves, finding the level she needed and the groove she wanted to stay in to make it to her first Grand Slam final, a little more than three years after her breakout, when she was just 15.
For Kostyuk, the match was ugly from the start, a cascade of errors, tentative swings, and balls pelting the middle of the net. She double-faulted twice in the first game, the second time on break point. She made 17 unforced errors in 7 games in the first set.
For Andreeva, prevailing meant little more than pushing at an open door. She appeared tight in her first service game, going down 0-40, but then Kostyuk made three consecutive errors. Andreeva held serve and was off to the races, when Kostyuk could have turned the first two games into a nervy aberration lost to history.
Rarely has a top had to do so little against another top player to accomplish something so big, especially against the hottest player in the sport.
Kostyuk carried a 17-match winning streak into the semifinal. She mostly stormed through her five matches heading into the semifinals. Even when she lost sets, she was battling and effective. In the round of 16, she beat Iga Świątek, a four-time French Open champion she’d not previously beaten in three tries, then she knocked out her compatriot, Elina Svitolina, who had been on a similarly hot run of form on the red dirt.
Heading into the semis, Andreeva was the higher seed — and the highest seed left in the draw, at No. 8 — but Kostyuk felt like the favorite, given her run of form and her beating Andreeva to win the Madrid Open in April.
She offered a glimmer of hope in the second set, when the roof began to close when she was serving at 1-4, as raindrops began to fall. As she closed the game, the crowd got loud behind her. She held serve, then jumped ahead of Andreeva and broke her. She was back on serve and Court Philippe-Chatrier had come alive, chanting her name.
It was just the kind of atmosphere Andreeva had tried to avoid. The noise under the roof had doomed her a year ago against Loïs Boisson, a hometown favorite.
Not this time. She broke Kostyuk right back, then held with little resistance, a final Kostyuk forehand flying long.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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