Ksenia Efremova heads into Roland-Garros with a simple aim and a hard draw. The 17-year-old French player, ranked beyond the 600th place on the WTA tour, said on Saturday she wants to make a Loïs Boisson-style run at what will be her first Grand Slam and first main draw on the women’s tour.
Efremova, who is scheduled to face Sorana Cîrstea in the first round, said: “Playing Roland-Garros, it’s home, it’s France. I’m going to try to do what Loïs Boisson did last year.” For a player still trying to turn junior promise into senior results, the match offers both a showcase and a test of how far her game has come.
Her rise in the junior game gave her the kind of attention that can travel quickly through French tennis. Efremova was crowned Australian Open junior champion on 1 February, becoming the second French player ever to win that title and the first to win a junior major since Elsa Jacquemot at Roland-Garros in 2020. She was due to resume at the WTA 125 in Les Sables-d’Olonne a fortnight later, but withdrew thirty minutes before her match against Mona Barthel because of a back injury in the warm-up.
That setback changed her spring. Efremova spent two and a half months without competition before returning in April at Madrid qualifying. There she beat Lulu Sun 6-4, 7-5 before losing to Alycia Parks 1-6, 6-7. She then lost to Moyuka Uchijima at Saint-Malo, though she took a set in a 4-6, 6-3, 3-6 defeat, and later fell to Tamara Korpatsch at the Trophée Clarins in Paris.
This week in Strasbourg qualifying, Efremova lost to Oleksandra Oliynykova, leaving her with four defeats against four Top 100 opponents in her career. That record explains why Roland-Garros matters so much today. Her comments carried confidence, but they also reflected how quickly the next step in a career can arrive before the results are fully there.
Born in Russia and naturalised French in 2023, Efremova arrived at the Mouratoglou Academy four years before that change of nationality. She said she loves practice matches and loves winning them above all, a line that fits a player still searching for the same certainty in live competition. Against Cîrstea, that search begins on home clay, in front of the crowd she has spent years preparing to meet.
