Follow The Athletic’s French Open coverageWelcome to the French Open briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.On Day 4, there was a stunning miss, a very good day for one player and yet more heat carnage.How did a player recover from a miss that defied belief?The smash, when players take the ball out of the air with an overhead shot, is one of the fundamentals of tennis. Essential for finishing points, it’s also a little misunderstood. The apparent simplicity makes it easy to be complacent; it also means that making a mistake on a smash is one of the more embarrassing mistakes in tennis, and perhaps any sport.Wednesday at the French Open, Russia’s Karen Khachanov was up match point against Marco Trungelliti of Argentina when he received the gift every player dreams of in such a big moment: A lob so feeble that they can let the ball bounce before hitting a smash. Taking the ball directly out of the air, especially when it is very sunny, can be risky. It’s all too easy to misread the flight or look at the sun and get dazzled. But Trungelliti’s lob was short enough that Khachanov, the No. 13 seed, could let it drop to a comfortable height and then dispatch it to end the match.Or, he could do this:Considering degree of difficulty, situation, and by how much he missed, Khachanov immediately entered worst-miss-of-all-time conversations.The 30-year-old still had a match to win. Trungelliti broke Khachanov’s serve to level the match for 5-5 and then dragged the Russian, who could have been forgiven for melting into a puddle, into a fourth-set tiebreak. But instead of dwelling on the miss, Khachanov got over the line, securing a 7-6(5), 5-7, 6-1, 7-6(4) win to move into the third round.An intriguing sub-plot to Khachanov’s miss was how it spread online. Tennis fans, sports fans, and people who don’t know they are tennis fans yet love mess. They love failure. They love mistakes. Official tennis accounts do not usually post these things, even though mistakes and strange moments going viral are some of the most reliable ways that a sport can reach a wider audience.This time though, the official Roland Garros account leaned into the drama, and posted the smash on X. Bless this tennis mess.— James HansenA good day for a four-time French Open champion, but a bad one for the plot?For the second year running, the tennis gods didn’t play ball.As at the 2025 French Open, tennis fans were one match away from the seventh instalment of the Iga Świątek vs. Jeļena Ostapenko head-to-head, only for the Latvian to fall short.Ostapenko’s 6-0 head-to-head winning record over Świątek is one of the most curious sequences in the sport. Świątek has been the higher-ranked player for all but one of those meetings, sometimes by a big margin, and yet she’s never been able to post a win against a player who is almost defined by her inconsistency.Inconsistency in every area apart from facing Świątek, where she delivers her best without fail. Seeing whether Świątek could finally end the streak at her most successful tournament was a tantalising prospect but, alas, Ostapenko fell just short — losing in three sets to Magda Linette Wednesday.Iga Świątek had a positive day at her most successful tournament. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)Świątek kept up her end of the bargain by comfortably beating Sara Bejlek to reach the French Open third round. A year ago she joked that she would be a terrible poker player after dissolving into giggles when trying to pretend she had no preference about playing Ostapenko or not. This time around, Świątek was more circumspect, saying in her news conference that, “I don’t want to even think about it now, because I’ll see who wins, and then I’ll prepare.”