Mensik: From Walking Wounded to Round 4 in Paris

Amidst all the chaos of the first week of Roland-Garros, where the draw has been cracked open by the seismic upsets of Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic over the last two days, a young Czech who looked dead and buried after his second round match is still very much in the mix. 

Flashback to two days ago, when Jakub Mensik finished his four hour and 41 minute victory over Mariano Navone on Court 6, then collapsed on the court. He lay there for several minutes, spent from a physical battle under the Parisian sun. 

How would he recover in time for his third round match?

We thought we had our answer – and it wasn’t pretty – on Saturday he took the court against the ever dangerous Alex de Minaur. Mensik could barely move in the first set. He won just five points and many thought he would soon pull the plug. 

Au contraire. Instead Mensik found his energy and stormed to a four-set victory to reach the fourth round in Paris for the first time. And he did it in rapid fashion, finishing his 0-6, 6-2, 6-2, 6-3 win in a mere two hours and 25 minutes. 

In a tournament that features zero former Grand Slam champions in the second week for the first time since 1968, when the Open Era commenced, can we throw the hard-serving Czech’s name in the ring as a potential champion? Pourquoi pas!

“I needed just some time to turn on the engine, I would say,” said Mensik, who also reached the round of 16 at the Australian Open this year. “And then of course I catch the rhythm. I catch the tempo. And then I’m just happy that the three sets that I won, I didn’t give him any chance to come back to the match.”

Mensik said the process of recovering after his win over Navone was far from simple. 

“Normally I would say that recovery day, it’s like chilling and basically doing nothing. But I did a lot of things, I would say, in the last 48 hours,” he said. “Obviously the first day it was just more to calm my body down, because obviously after the cramps and actually, super dehydration, I needed to put as much fluids as I could inside of me.

The next day, of course, it was more to recover my body physically, of course to do some cardio, because I still needed to keep my body up, to [remove] the lactate from my legs and from my body to put back into the energy that I needed today.”

Mensik will face Andrey Rublev in the round of 16 – the Russian has won both previous meetings between the pair.