PARIS — Martina Trevisan’s path to the French Open quarterfinals was harder to negotiate than the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. In a women’s draw that has seen most of the top-seeded players spin out, Trevisan personifies the resilience of those who have found a way through.

There were the three qualifying matches that she won just to enter the main singles draw. The questionable line call that went against her while she was trying to serve out her second-round match against the teenage phenom Coco Gauff that she weathered. The two match points against her in the third round against 20th-seeded Maria Sakkari that she withstood. And her first defeat of a top-10 player, which she walked off with on Saturday in the fourth round against No. 8 Kiki Bertens.

But nothing 2020 has unleashed on Trevisan — not this year’s French Open draw nor the coronavirus pandemic, which ravaged her native Italy and heavily compressed the WTA Tour schedule — was harder for her to negotiate, she said, than the eating disorder that stilled her tennis career for four years, beginning in 2010.

“I know that I have done a great job,” said Trevisan, who recently started to share the details of her harrowing journey, first in July in an athletes’ blog, The Owl Post, in which she described trying to be seen by losing so much weight from her 5-foot-3 frame that she all but disappeared.

Source: New York Times

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