French Open women’s semifinals: Coco Gauff wants tennis VAR after Swiatek defeat

Welcome back to the French Open briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.

On Day 12 of Roland Garros 2024, the women’s semifinals took centre stage.

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Tennis can learn from so many sports on video refereeing
The most frustrating thing about so many of the player vs. chair umpire controversies is how avoidable they are. If only every tournament employed the fully electronic line calling system that is in use at dozens of tournaments, including the U.S. and Australian Opens.

Tennis can get the far more fallible humans off the court, making better decisions and insulating them from criticism for not exactly detecting where a ball travelling over 100 miles per hour has landed in a split-second.

Thursday brought the latest, in the second set of the French Open semifinal between Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff.

A line judge erroneously called a Swiatek serve out instead of in. Since the ball was coming at Gauff at roughly 100 miles per hour, she swung at it and finished her shot, sending a backhand return a couple of feet wide. The chair umpire overruled the call but also ruled that the call hadn’t affected Gauff’s ability and opportunity to return the ball unhindered, so Swiatek deserved to get the point.

Gauff approached umpire Aurelie Tourte and erupted as she almost never does, telling her that the crowd was “booing because they know (she) is wrong,” and telling her to learn the rules of the game she is paid to officiate in a Grand Slam semifinal.

After the match, Gauff was bewildered as to why tennis couldn’t make use of video replays. “I definitely think at this point it’s almost ridiculous that we don’t have it. Not just because that happened to me, but every sport has it,” she said.

“There are so many decisions that are made, and it sucks as a player to go back or online and you see that you were completely right, and it’s, like, what does that give you in that moment?”

Here’s how the situation would have happened with an electronic system: No out call, no correction. No one yelling as Gauff is focussed on returning a high-speed serve. No discussion of whether the call came before or after her swing. If Gauff had thought the ball was out, she could have watched a computer-generated replay of the ball hitting the court — the one that everyone except the players and the umpires can see on their TV screens.

The call would have been confirmed. Everyone would have moved on.

Get the humans off the court.

Can Iga Swiatek get scarier? Her serve says yes
Wednesday’s women’s quarterfinals were defined by breaks of serve on both sides in both matches.

So too was Iga Swiatek’s quarterfinal against Coco Gauff on Thursday, just in the more conventional way: the player who gets the breaks wins.

Swiatek is a juggernaut at the best of times, an even more advanced version on clay, but the one place she has felt vulnerable, especially against the players that can take time away from her (Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Naomi Osaka… Jelena Ostapenko!), is her serve.

Unfortunately for those players, and with an even more pyrrhic sense of inevitability for everybody else, she appears to be sorting it out.