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Three days before Roland Garros begins, Naomi Osaka is standing on a side practice court at the Stade Roland Garros, hitting flat backhands at a target chalked onto the baseline. Behind her, in the players' lounge corridor, her two-year-old daughter Shai is being walked between meeting rooms by a member of the family team. A few metres away, a tall, serious-looking Polish coach is timing the rallies on his phone.
The Polish coach is Tomasz Wiktorowski. For three years, between 2021 and the start of 2024, he was the man on the other side of the net at this same venue, building the player who won three of those Roland Garros titles in a row — Iga Swiatek. He turned up on Osaka's team in August 2025 after she split from Patrick Mouratoglou. Within ten weeks, Osaka had reached a US Open semi-final, her first Grand Slam semi-final since 2021. She has now spent six months learning how Wiktorowski thinks about clay.
And clay is the one part of tennis Osaka has never solved.
Four-time Slam champion. Two Australian Opens. Two US Opens. Six trips to Roland Garros. Zero wins past the third round. The French Open is the only major she has never figured out — and the one she is now coming to with the same architecture that Wiktorowski used to make his last player almost untouchable on it.
This is the quietest serious comeback in the women's draw. Almost nobody is writing about it. That is what makes it worth a look.
Naomi Ōsaka in 2022, her last full season before maternity leave. She has now spent two seasons building back from a 2024 return that almost nobody mapped. Photo: 江戸村のとくぞう / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0
The slam she has never figured out
The numbers, briefly:
- Roland Garros appearances: 6 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2024, 2025)
- Best result: 3rd round (2016, 2019)
- Career match wins at Roland Garros: 7
- Career match wins at the Australian Open: 22, with 2 titles
- Career match wins at the US Open: 31, with 2 titles
- Career match wins at Wimbledon: 6
The difference is not small. Osaka has won more matches in a single US Open than she has across her entire Roland Garros career. The slam she never won is not, statistically, an open question. It is a known weakness.
There are reasons that are easy to name. Osaka's game was built on flat power: a heavy first serve, two-handed backhand that takes time away from opponents, a forehand that finishes points before the rally gets too long. That style works on hard courts because the ball goes through the surface. On red clay, where rallies stretch and the ball sits up higher and slower, the same shape becomes a liability. Heavy first-strike tennis is not the language Paris rewards.
Her 2025 Roland Garros first-round loss to Paula Badosa — 6-7(1), 6-1, 6-4 — was the most painful single match of her clay career to date. Fifty-four unforced errors. A first set she should have closed out. Acknowledgement of the surface problem from her own press conference afterwards. She left Paris and went to North America to start the rebuild.
Why this Roland Garros is different: Wiktorowski
Tomasz Wiktorowski is a quiet operator. He coached the Polish No. 1 Agnieszka Radwanska to a Wimbledon final and the Top 5 in the 2010s. He then took over Iga Swiatek in late 2021, ran her team through the period in which she won the 2022, 2023 and 2024 Roland Garros titles, climbed to world No. 1, and stayed there for 71 consecutive weeks. He has the deepest active coaching résumé on clay outside the Nadal coaching tree.
When Swiatek and Wiktorowski parted in late 2024, the prevailing assumption inside the tour was that he would take a year off, then turn up on the bench of a top-five player. Instead, in July 2025, he started a trial with Osaka — a player ranked outside the top 50, two and a half years older, with a fundamentally different game shape and a body that had just produced a child.
Osaka has said in interviews that her first impression of Wiktorowski was that he looked "very scary." She has also said that her actual experience of him is the opposite: warm, patient, technically obsessive, willing to discuss the same shot for twenty minutes after a practice session. He runs her practice in the same order he ran Swiatek's. He emphasises early ball position, depth, and the kick second serve that Swiatek used to neutralise returners on clay.
That last detail matters. Osaka's second serve, throughout her four-Slam career, has been a weakness. A flat second ball averaging 150 km/h sits up nicely against a top returner. Wiktorowski's chief modification, working with both Radwanska and Swiatek, was to teach a heavier kick second serve that gets above the shoulder, especially on slow surfaces. If that modification holds in match conditions across two weeks of best-of-three sets, Osaka becomes a different opponent.
2024: the return that nobody quite mapped
Osaka came back to professional tennis in January 2024 after the birth of her daughter Shai in July 2023. Her early return was, by her own standards, slow. She lost first or second round in Brisbane, Auckland, Melbourne. She arrived at Roland Garros 2024 ranked outside the top 130, and beat Lucia Bronzetti 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 in the first round — her first French Open match win since 2021. She then lost to a peak Swiatek in three sets in the second round. By the end of 2024 she had returned to the top 60.
Most of 2024 was the slow grind of a returning mother. The conversation around her was muted. The narrative — Osaka as the highest-profile Black mother to come back from maternity leave to elite professional tennis — was a story journalists wanted to write but Osaka did not want them to write. She prefers the work to speak.
2025 was the year the work started talking again. By the time of the US Open, Osaka was ranked No. 24. She had split with Patrick Mouratoglou after eighteen months together — by her own description, the split was not bitter, the methodology simply was not what she needed at this stage — and was three weeks into a trial with Wiktorowski. The US Open run did the talking.
The 2025 US Open run that changed the conversation
Osaka in a portrait from her peak years. The post-maternity 2025 US Open semi-final returned her to that level. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
Osaka reached the semi-finals at the 2025 US Open. She beat Karolina Muchova in three sets in the third round. She beat 2023 US Open champion Coco Gauff 6-3, 6-2 in the fourth round — her first top-five win at a Slam in her career. The Gauff match was the first time in years that the audience inside Arthur Ashe felt the room tilt back towards Osaka. She walked through the quarter-final against Karolina Muchova on momentum alone.
The semi-final loss to Amanda Anisimova — 6-7(4), 7-6(3), 6-3 — was the kind of three-set defeat that, in her younger career, would have rattled her for months. Osaka treated it differently. Her on-court interview afterwards was generous toward Anisimova and brief about herself. "I can't be mad," she said. The line was not performed; it was actually the line of a player who had reached a stage of the career where individual losses no longer carried existential weight.
After the US Open she returned to the WTA top 20 for the first time since January 2022. She finished 2025 in the top 15. She extended the Wiktorowski partnership through 2026. She booked the clay swing.
Clay 2026: Madrid and Rome added more than they took away
The 2026 clay season has not been a fairy tale. It has been better than that — it has been an actual data set.
Madrid Open (April): Osaka entered as the No. 14 seed. First-round bye. Second round: beat Camila Osorio 6-2, 7-5. That was her first clay-court win of 2026 and her first win past the second round at the Madrid Open in her entire career. She lost her next match (third round) but the Osorio win was a directional indicator — she stayed in long rallies, won 11 of 13 first-serve points on her opening service game, and only twice in the match resorted to the heavy flat first ball that has been her clay-court tell.
Italian Open (May): Osaka beat Cristina Bucsa, then beat a qualifier, then beat one more opponent to reach the round of 16. Her fourth-round opponent was Iga Swiatek, her current coach's former protégée and the player who has won three of the last four Roland Garros titles. Swiatek won 6-2, 6-1 in 1 hour and 22 minutes. The score line was lopsided. The lessons inside it were not.
Osaka spent that match doing the thing Wiktorowski has been asking her to do — engaging the rally, taking the ball earlier, not bailing out to first-strike tennis when the point extended. Swiatek won because she was the better clay player on that night. But Osaka had reached a Rome round of 16, her best result at the Italian Open in her career, and had given the man with her current credential file 90 minutes of forensic data on how to attack the player most likely to stand in her Roland Garros draw.
The Rome run also produced one small confirmation that Wiktorowski has Osaka's kick second serve working: she held serve 89% of the time across her four matches, a figure higher than any clay tournament of her professional career.
What the draw might give her at Roland Garros 2026
Osaka is seeded No. 14 at Roland Garros 2026. The seeding gives her a likely run that looks like this:
- Round 1: a lower-ranked player or qualifier. Osaka should win.
- Round 2: a player ranked roughly 40-60. Threatening but winnable.
- Round 3: an opponent in the 25-40 range. The historical wall.
- Round 4: probably a top-eight seed. The first meaningful test for a player who has never gone this deep at this Slam.
- Quarter-final: another top-five player. New territory.
The first three rounds will tell the entire story. Osaka has lost in the third round of Roland Garros twice in her career and in the first or second round in every other appearance. The data point that matters in Paris is not "can she beat a top player on red clay" — it is "can she get past the third weekend without breaking down mentally or tactically." The Wiktorowski version of her game is built to make that more likely than at any point in her career.
If the bracket cooperates, the fourth round produces an Aryna Sabalenka or a Coco Gauff. Either match is the test Osaka has not yet passed at a Slam she has never won. The Sabalenka possibility is the more interesting one. Sabalenka entered Roland Garros 2026 as the WTA world No. 1 with a publicly stated 18-month wedding timeline that bought her two extra years to keep winning Slams. Her power game tends to lose its edge on clay slowness. Osaka, on a confident day, can match that power.
The off-court architecture
The version of Osaka returning to Roland Garros in 2026 is not the same person who arrived in 2018. There is a daughter. There are several brand campaigns that have publicly normalised her struggles around mental health and motherhood. Her OLLY wellness campaign is among the more honest sponsorship rollouts the sport has seen. There is a Louis Vuitton ambassadorship that has, almost inadvertently, made her one of the most visible Black women in the European luxury-fashion ecosystem.
She also runs a sports-media company called Hana Kuma, which she co-founded with Stuart Duguid, her long-time agent, and LeBron James's SpringHill. The company has produced documentary projects and has tilted Osaka toward the producer side of tennis culture — a useful re-architecture for a player whose mental-health pull-outs in 2021 and 2022 made her one of the most over-discussed athletes of the era.
The result, in 2026, is that Osaka is rebuilding the playing side of her career inside a personal infrastructure that mostly did not exist when she won her first Slam. The maternity break gave her time to set that infrastructure up. The clay swing is the first time we have seen her play with all of it in place.
Confirmed, and what is just mood
Confirmed: Osaka has six career Roland Garros appearances, no result past the third round (her best results: third round in 2016 and 2019). Confirmed: she returned from maternity leave in January 2024 after the birth of her daughter Shai in July 2023. Confirmed: she split from Patrick Mouratoglou in July 2025 and began working with Tomasz Wiktorowski at the Canadian Open in August 2025. Confirmed: she reached the semi-finals at the 2025 US Open, defeating Coco Gauff 6-3, 6-2 in the fourth round and losing to Amanda Anisimova in three sets in the semi-final. Confirmed: she has continued the Wiktorowski partnership through 2026. Confirmed: at the 2026 Madrid Open she beat Camila Osorio in the second round (her first 2026 clay win); at the 2026 Italian Open she reached the round of 16 before losing to Iga Swiatek 6-2, 6-1. Confirmed: she is the No. 14 seed at Roland Garros 2026.
Confirmed by Osaka herself: she initially thought Wiktorowski "looked very scary," and has since said that his actual presence on court is "warm" and "friendly." She has described her 2025 US Open semi-final loss to Anisimova by saying she "can't be mad."
Not confirmed: whether the kick second serve Wiktorowski has built will hold across a best-of-three Slam in match-pressure conditions. Not confirmed: any specific 2026 Roland Garros draw outcome (the draw is being held on Thursday, May 21). Not confirmed: any of the predictions floating around about whether Osaka can win a Slam in 2026 — nobody is making that claim seriously, including her own team.
The bottom line
Naomi Osaka does not need Roland Garros to validate her career. She has four Slams. She has the next two decades of brand income locked in. She has, at 28, the longest comeback runway of any returning mother in the top fifty.
She does, however, need Roland Garros to mean something. It is the slam she has never solved. It is the slam her current coach used to own. It is the slam that, if she goes deep at it in 2026, would write the comeback narrative more cleanly than another US Open title ever could.
Nobody outside her team is predicting it. That is exactly the kind of arc Osaka has always rewarded most — the one that arrives quietly, while the cameras are on somebody else, and only becomes obvious in the second week.
Sources
- WTA: Rankings Watch — Anisimova makes Top 5 debut, Osaka returns to Top 20
- WTA: Osaka splits with coach Patrick Mouratoglou, will trial with Tomasz Wiktorowski
- US Open: Naomi Osaka blitzes past Coco Gauff into 2025 US Open quarterfinal
- US Open: Naomi Osaka upbeat after 2025 US Open semifinal defeat
- Roland Garros official: US Open 2025 — Osaka back where she belongs
- Tennis.com: Naomi Osaka exits Roland Garros in the first round with a loss to Paula Badosa
- Tennis.com: Naomi Osaka's win over Coco Gauff shows the progress she's made with coach Tomasz Wiktorowski
- Tennis.com: Rome previews — Can Naomi Osaka finish what she started against Iga Swiatek?
- Olympics.com: Italian Open 2026 — Iga Świątek breezes past Naomi Osaka to book spot in quarter-finals
- Tennis World USA: Madrid — Naomi Osaka wins first match on clay in 2026
- TIME: Welcome Back, Naomi Osaka
- Roland-Garros 2026 official entry list
Photo credits
Hero: "Naomi Ōsaka 20220920a21 cropped" by 江戸村のとくぞう / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 Inline portrait: "NaomiOsaka-smile-2020 (cropped tight)" / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
