Rafa Jódar reached the Roland Garros round of 16 for the first time in his career on Friday after outlasting Alex Michelsen in a four-hour, 16-minute five-set battle, 7-6, 6-7, 4-6, 3-6, 6-3. The win sends the 2006-born Madrilenian into a Sunday meeting with Pablo Carreño, and it guarantees Spain will have a player in the quarterfinals.
For Jódar, the result was more than another upset on clay. He has now earned 18 victories on the surface and matched the kind of week that puts his name into a very different bracket of conversation at a major. He said after the match, “Es un sueño hecho realidad, he luchado hasta el final.”
The path was not smooth. Jódar took the first set in a tiebreak and then served for the second at 6-5, only for Michelsen to drag the match into a long, punishing fifth set. That mattered because Jódar was playing only his second career five-setter; his first came against Sakamoto at the Australian Open. This one required endurance as much as shotmaking.
Michelsen also spent part of the afternoon dealing with a back problem and wore a bulky bandage around the area, but Jódar still had to finish the job himself. He did, and the scale of the result is hard to miss: since 2001, there had not been two Spaniards aged 20 or younger in the third round at Roland Garros, and before this tournament the last time no Spanish tennis player reached the round of 16 in Paris was 1996.
Jódar and Martín Landaluce came through Madrid’s Club de Tenis Chamartín, part of a generation that has been followed closely in Spain for years. Now Jódar has pushed farther than he ever had at a Grand Slam, and Sunday brings the kind of all-Spanish match that could deepen that run. The only question left is whether he can recover quickly enough to carry the same legs and the same nerve into Carreño.
