It’s day four of the French Open and the rain has been biblical. Relentless. ‘Brutal,’ as , the partner of US No 1 Taylor Fritz, puts it.
‘It’s like full-on rain delays, there were no matches played yesterday at all,’ she says. Her Instagram stories summarise the goings on: rain falling on concrete set to B.J.
Thomas’s and a picture of the monitor with a view to all the tennis-less, crowd-less outdoor courts clad in Wotsit-orange, waterproof anoraks. It’s a far cry from the postcard pretty, Eiffel Tower-adorned vistas you’d expect from the French capital..
. and also not the weather you’d naturally align with the glamour-filled life of the Tennis WAG. Because: the wives and girlfriends of tennis players are seemingly too aesthetically perfect to have to tolerate irritants like rain.
And these women are currently in the spotlight like never before: their moods, facial expressions and outfits painstakingly dissected by members of both the sports and fashion media. There was Netflix’s (tennis’s answer to F1’s ) – and then , the Luca Guadagnino-directed feature film, which casts Zendaya as the trophy, Queen Bee of the tennis wives. A tennis-pro turned pro-wife pulling the strings of her husband’s professional sporting career.
His triumphs? Her personal victories. The losses? Well, she feels it too. It’s something Ayan Broomfield, Francis Tiafoe’s girlfriend of 10 years, knows a thing or two about – the pair met as junior players, before injury f.
