French opens up for marathon men

Tennis/French Open: We are down to the mountain stages. As the tennis peleton sheds its weak before Sunday's final, just four have not broken down and been packed away in the broom wagon.  Johnny Watterson reports from Roland Garros

The remaining names are less familiar than many that have gone, Martin Verkerk, Guillermo Coria, Juan Carlos Ferrero and last year's winner Albert Costa.

To these players, who build their careers on the baked clay of Europe and South America, the grass at Wimbledon is ephemeral. It has a frenzied four-week lifespan leading up to and including the event and then it's all over for another year. Such is the surface's eccentricity some may not even turn up. For the remaining players this is the most important Grand Slam. The French Open, of the four majors, demands the marathon runner's heart and the Tour rider's threshold for pain.

But among the tennis ultras, Costa has emerged as a player with a freakish appetite for confronting logic with grim endurance. Following yesterday's five-set quarter-final win over compatriot Tommy Robredo, which sets him up with a semi-final against his friend Ferrero, Costa set a standard by which all dirt 'grunts' can measure themselves.

Costa has climbed a mountain in nearly every match he has played so far. Three times he has come back from two sets down to win his match in five sets, an achievement never before accomplished at Roland Garros. And, since the start of the Open era in 1968, only three other players - Nicolas Lapentti, Todd Martin and Steve Denton - have played and won four matches in five sets in a Grand Slam event.

To even explain it by way of Costa's foot prints on the Grand Slam canvas is difficult. Before this tournament, he had never before won even back-to-back five-set matches in 29 Grand Slam appearances.

His shortest match here was his only four-set contest and that was completed in three hours seven minutes against Frenchman Arneaud Clement, while his third-round war of attrition against Nicolas Lapentti took a monumental four hours and 38 minutes.

Costa's best hope now is to avoid a repeat of that kind of marathon and dismiss Ferrero in three, but on the basis of fatigue alone, the chances of Costa retaining his 2002 title must be regarded as slim.

"It's tough to explain," he said after beating Robreda 2-6, 3-6, 6-4, 7-5, 6-3. "I am in the fifth set and I am okay. I feel tired but I have power enough to win. I don't know. I'm physically fit. My physical trainer is always helping me. I can tell you nothing else.

"Against Lapentti and today, you start to think when you are two sets down," added Costa. "Today Robredo was killing me, he was hitting so hard. I moved to try to make the points shorter. Shorter and faster. And serving big. Today, it was the perfect tactic.

"Physically it was one of the toughest matches I've ever played in my life."

It was 21-year-old Robredo's inexperience that possibly let him down, as he swept to an unfamiliar two set, 2-6, 3-6, lead. Three service breaks in the first set and two in the second painted a doleful picture for 27 year-old Costas until just one break in the ninth game of the third gave him a glimpse of hope. Then another service break in the seventh game of the fourth set evened the match before Costa swept through the final set winning five games in succession and closing out the match in, for him, a relatively comfortable three and a half hours.

On Costa's side, his fair-haired buddy Ferrero was also forced to five sets yesterday evening before defeating Chilean Fernando Gonzalez 6-1, 3-6, 6-1, 5-7, 6-4.