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Francesca Schiavone, winner at the Roland Garros 2010 and finalist a second time in Paris the following year, she returns to the WTA Tour after retiring and after defeating a lymphoma: former Italian tennis star will train Petra Martic.
In the other Grand Slam tournaments Schiavone has reached at least the quarter-finals, while she has lifted the Fed Cup trophy on three occasions: in 2006, 2009 and 2010. In 2011 she reached number 4 in the WTA ranking and in 2017 she won her eighth and last career trophy in Bogotà, Colombia, where she defeated the Spanish Lara Arruabarrena in the final with a score of 6- 4 7-5.
Retired in 2018, Francesca will now come back to the Tour as a coach, a role she has always desired: she will take care in particular of the Croatian tennis player Petra Martic, 30, current number 21 in the world.
Francesca Schiavone will work with Petra Martic
The Croatian player played the most quarter-finals at the 2019 French Open, where she was stopped by Marketa Vondrousova in two sets.
WTA number 14 just over a year ago, Petra won in Chicago and Istanbul, reaching the final in Kuala Lumpur, Bucharest and Zhengzhou. The collaboration between the Italian and the Croatian will begin next week with the WTA 250 event on clay in Istanbul, Turkey, scheduled for April 19-25.
Born in 1998, the tournament saw champions such as Venus Williams, Elena Dementieva, Agnieszka Radwanska and Caroline Wozniacki triumph. Last year the title was won by the Romanian Patricia Maria Tig, who overtook the qualified Eugenie Bouchard in the final in a comeback with a score of 2-6 6-1 7-6.
As for Martic's performances on clay, the Croatian reached the quarter-finals in Madrid in 2019 and the second round at the Internazionali BNL d'Italia in 2018 and 2020, beaten in Rome last year by Kazakh Yulia Putintseva.
in the third set. The 2021 edition of Roland Garros in Paris will start a week late, due to the dizzying growth in the number of Coronavirus infections recorded in France in recent weeks, which has forced the country to enter a third lockdown.