Key quotes from the fourth day of the French Open at Roland Garros on Wednesday:
“Every time I see a young player coming, they have a lot of hunger, for sure. They fight a lot, for sure, because it’s their dream place. But same as me, it’s my dream place too. When you arrive in the professional tour, you don’t think about anymore about the age because everybody’s the same. You just face another opponent. Doesn’t matter for me. If is world No. 1, whether it’s 100, doesn’t matter the age.”
— Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen won’t be wearing kid gloves when facing 18-year-old Grand Slam debutant Victoria Mboko in her next match.
“Well, I mean, he’s free. I’m lucky he could come here to Paris, watch a few of my matches. Just talking that he has to bring, you know, the materials to cut my hair that I needed. I think everybody saw my hair, my beard. So I had to do something, about it.”
— Carlos Alcaraz had his barber fly into Paris to give him a trim ahead of his second round win against Fabian Marozsan.
“Well, it’s not the best. Normally I am the person who goes to bed late. Yeah, during the tournament, it’s not easy to find the sleep anyway. Yeah, but it’s fine. It’s fine. I’m very happy with his (Gael Monfils) performance, the way that he fought yesterday. Of course, I mean, I cannot allow myself to be frustrated for him to make this match long.”
— Elina Svitolina was up early to win the second match of the day on Court Simonne Mathieu after her husband Monfils fought through in five sets in the night session on Tuesday.
“I live in a tough situation, (supporting) Juventus. It’s not easy to speak about football. But yeah, I’ll go with Italian. I’ll go with the Inter. I think they made a really, really nice two matches with Barcelona. I will go with them. A few players that I know of Inter. I’ll try to watch the match.”
— Italian eighth seed Lorenzo Musetti looks ahead to Saturday’s Champions League final between Inter Milan and Paris Saint-Germain.
“I practice pretty early so then I can spend the whole day kind of chilling. It’s nothing special. Usually I don’t go out right before the match so I just go to the park, do some Lego, read a book. I don’t watch too many TV shows because then I have weird dreams!”
“I have to stick to the things that calm me down. Paris is beautiful so just having a walk outside is a nice experience so that I’m not overthinking it.”
— Triple reigning champion Iga Swiatek shares some of her secrets for success at the French Open.
“I still want to be the best player in the world and I still want to do great things around this sport that I chose to play. My attention and focus is always to try and improve any aspect of my game. I’m an optimistic person. I don’t want to, you know, use any excuses or anything like that, so my entire focus is on how can we come to solutions, solve certain things. It’s a constant puzzle.”
— Former world number three Stefanos Tsitsipas on searching for the winning formula after suffering his earliest French Open exit in seven years.
