# **Liudmila Samsonova: The Tennis Sensation Taking the Internet by Storm** In the vast, chaotic digital landscape of the internet, trends come and go faster than a tennis ball at Wimbledon. But every now and then, a name emerges that captures the collective attention of the global audience. Enter Liudmila Samsonova, the Russian tennis prodigy…
PARIS – Somewhere between the espresso machines on Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and the drone-shot skyline of Roland-Garros, Anastasia Potapova is quietly reminding the planet that geopolitics can still fit inside a tennis ball. One moment she’s hammering a forehand; the next she’s trending in four languages because someone recognized the ribbon in her hair…
Zeynep Sönmez Is Not Your Feel-Good Sports Story—She’s the Canary in Tennis’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If you blinked during the third round of Roland-Garros you might have missed her: a 20-year-old Turk with a backhand like a scimitar and a surname that looks like autocorrect’s revenge. Zeynep Sönmez dispatched the world…
Copenhagen, Wednesday night: while most of Europe argued about gas prices that rise faster than a teenager’s heart-rate on TikTok, Clara Tauson was quietly dismantling another seeded opponent in Linz. If you blinked, you missed it—much like the continent’s once-vaunted welfare states, the match was gone before the espresso cooled. For the uninitiated, Tauson is…
Barbora Krejčíková and the Quiet Collapse of Tennis’ Old World Order by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Prague – Somewhere between the second espresso and the third existential crisis of the week, Barbora Krejčíková won the French Open again. This time the victory felt less like a coronation and more like an accidental coup: a 28-year-old…
PARIS—The third-round draw at Roland-Garros was supposed to be a formality: some fresh-faced prodigy versus a 33-year-old Romanian best remembered for a 2009 quarter-final run when TikTok was still just the sound a clock made. Instead, Sorana Cîrstea spent two hours reminding the planet that the tennis narrative is written in erasable ink. She won…
Diana Shnaider: A Tennis Prodigy for the Age of Global Collapse From the clay of Roland-Garros to the hard courts of Flushing Meadows, 19-year-old Diana Shnaider has materialized like a polite but lethal apparition, reminding us that even as the planet smolders, someone somewhere is still practicing drop shots with monastic devotion. Born in Moscow,…
Veronika Kudermetova and the Beautiful, Pointless Resilience of the Tour By Dave’s Locker Global Sports Correspondent Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, halfway between a Dubai duty-free lounge and the next time zone she must pretend to inhabit, Veronika Kudermetova is probably trying to remember what month it is. Not that it matters; the WTA calendar…
The Curious Case of Victoria Jiménez Kasintseva, or How a 17-Year-Old Andorran Became the Canary in Tennis’ Global Coal Mine *By a Correspondent Who Has Seen Too Many Post-Match Pressers and Drunk Too Much Weak Espresso* Let the record show that the Principality of Andorra—population 79,000, most of whom are either duty-free perfume bottles or…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Basque barricades and the manicured lawns of Roland-Garros, a 27-year-old Californian-Moroccan-Filipina with a passport thicker than a Michelin guide has become tennis’s latest geopolitical Rorschach test. Nina Ghaibi doesn’t just hit balls; she ricochets through the fault lines of identity politics, oligarchic sponsorship, and the eternal human urge to package diaspora trauma…
