Roland Garros has imposed a $65,000 fine on Paraguayan Adolfo Daniel Vallejo after comments he made about the chair umpire following his second-round match.

The 22-year-old, ranked 71st, lost a nearly five-hour, five-set match to 17-year-old Frenchman Moise Kouame. Vallejo led 5-2 in the fifth set before the contest was decided in a tiebreaker. After the match he criticized Brazil’s Ana Carvalho, saying she was not strong enough to handle the partisan crowd and that such a match “has to be refereed by a man.”

“It’s a very demanding crowd and you need a lot of strength to go against the crowd,” he told Spanish-language outlet Clay. “The crowd was very out of line, but I understand they’re supporting their compatriot. It’s quite an intense crowd and that’s why I was prepared; I already knew it would be like that and, to be honest, it didn’t harm me, but rather strengthened him.”

Roland Garros and the French Tennis Federation called the remarks “unacceptable” and said Vallejo would receive a “significant sanction.” “The competence of an umpire is not determined by their gender, but by their professionalism and ability to officiate at the highest level,” the statement read. “The outcome of a sporting event, whether positive or negative, can never justify or excuse such remarks.”

Tournament director Amelie Mauresmo told reporters the fine was “representing roughly half of his prize money.” Organizers noted that players reaching the second round at the French Open receive 130,000 euros ($151,000) and later clarified that the fine was $65,000, not euros. “This is clearly unacceptable,” Mauresmo said. “Once again, such remarks have no place here.”

Vallejo subsequently said his comments had been misrepresented and issued an apology on social media. “my comments were not meant in the way they have been understood.” “I have respect for the umpire and for the job they do, after a [five-hour] battle I was very heated and with a lot of emotions, I apologize,” Vallejo wrote on Instagram late on Friday. “I also want to clarify that I didn’t blame the lost [sic] on her, she did a good job throughout the whole match.”

Flavio Cobolli survived a tense finish to his fourth-round match, holding off a spirited rally from Zachary Svajda to reach the Roland Garros Round of 16.

Cobolli moved ahead 5-1 in the fourth set with hopes of finishing in under three hours, but Svajda fought back to win five consecutive games. The No. 10 seed was broken twice while serving for the match and missed a match point at 5-4. Cobolli dropped a mini break at 5-4 in the tiebreak but steadied to close out the victory and avoid a deciding set.

Speaking on Court Philippe Chatrier after the match, Cobolli did not hide how close the moment came to slipping away. “The only thing that I understood today is that the match is never done. I almost sh\ my pants,” he told the Court Philippe Chatrier crowd. “Now I’m happy but I’m still nervous. I have to recover a bit now.”

In the press, he reflected on how pressure affects his game. “I think when the match is almost done, you start to think of it, and that’s the problem with my character, because I don’t like to think a bit. I just want to play my best tennis possible. But if I think, especially if I’m nervous, I start to play a different tennis, and of course the Chatrier is not easy for everyone. So I think also the court was tough.”

Asked about the celebration on court that followed, Cobolli said, “I think they deserve to win the Champions League,” in reference to the ceremony he returned to Chatrier to attend.

The 24-year-old reached the third Saturday at a major for the second time, matching his best Grand Slam run after a quarterfinal appearance at Wimbledon last summer. He is the only man to reach the round of 16 without dropping a set this fortnight. Cobolli has 13 wins in this season’s European clay swing, including victories over Alexander Zverev in Munich and a Top 10 win over Daniil Medvedev en route to a Madrid quarterfinal.

Cobolli will next face the winner of fourth-seeded Felix Auger-Aliassime and Alejandro Tabilo. Two countrymen, Matteo Berrettini and Matteo Arnaldi, were due on court later Monday.

Serena Williams has confirmed she will return to competitive tennis at 44, accepting a wild card to play doubles at the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club. It will be her first tournament appearance since the third round of the 2022 US Open, the match that accompanied an announced “evolution” away from the sport.

Williams remains one of the most decorated players of the Open Era. She turned professional in 1995 at 14, won 23 Grand Slam titles—surpassing Stefanie Graf at the 2017 Australian Open—and spent 319 weeks as the WTA’s world No. 1, the third-longest total behind Graf and Martina Navratilova. Rather than a formal retirement in 2022, Williams described her shift in status as an “evolution.”

Off court, Williams is a mother of two. Her elder daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr., was born in 2017, and her second daughter, Adira River, arrived in 2023. During her time away from regular competition she has pursued business projects and taken on a role as a spokesperson for Ro, a telehealth company that markets GLP-1 weight-loss medications. Williams said she lost 34 pounds on Zepbound and appeared in a Ro commercial that aired during Super Bowl LX earlier this year.

Her elder sister Venus has continued competing into her 40s, becoming the oldest woman to win a professional tennis match in more than 20 years at the Mubadala Citi DC Open last summer and reaching the US Open quarterfinals in women’s doubles alongside Leylah Fernandez. After Venus pushed Karolina Muchova to three sets at the US Open in singles, Serena paid tribute on social media: “Strength, courage, determination, class, perseverance, inspiration… there’s not enough words to describe how proud I am of you @VenusWilliams,” Serena captioned. “P.S. I hope to be like you.”

It was around that time that speculation about Serena’s own return gathered pace, and in December she re-entered the International Tennis Integrity Association’s anti-doping testing pool, a move that helped fuel comeback rumours ahead of her doubles entry at Queen’s Club.