A Handshake Snub gets a chilly reception at the French Open on Day 1

When the women’s singles draw for the French Open pitted Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus against Marta Kostyuk of Ukraine in the opening round, there was no doubt that the start of the tournament would bring fireworks.

It did that and more.

The result showed a decisive 6-3, 6-2 victory for Sabalenka, the reigning Australian Open champion, the second seed in Paris and one of the most popular players in the world.

But what didn’t show on the scoreline was the behavior of the morning crowd on the Roland Garros main field, Philippe Chatrier. Spectators exhorted Kostyuk at the start of the match, then rained boos when she left the field without shaking hands with Sabalenka. Kostyuk has refused to shake hands with a player from Russia or Belarus.

And then there was Sabalenka, who came as close to condemning the Russian invasion on Sunday in a rare statement of defiance by an athlete from Belarus or Russia.

“Nobody in this world, Russian athletes or Belarusian athletes, supports the war. Nobody,” Sabalenka said at a press conference after her victory. “How can we support the war? No one, normal people, will never support it.

“This is like one plus one, it’s two,” she continued, saying that if she could stop the war, she would. “Unfortunately, it’s not in our hands.”

But shortly after, Kostyuk dismissed Sabalenka’s feelings as empty words.

“I feel like you have to ask these players who they want to win the war because if you ask this question, I’m not so sure these people will say they want Ukraine,” Kostyuk said.

She added that Sabalenka should speak for herself and not for other players from Russia and Belarus.

“I personally know tennis athletes who support the war,” she said without identifying anyone.

The impact of the war in Ukraine on tennis is constant and never-ending. Fifteen months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war seems to have no end. (Belarus has provided a staging post for Russian soldiers, and its leader has said the country would join the war if attacked.)

Belarus and Russia have been banned from team tennis competitions and their flags and country names have been banned from the sport. The moves have left players from Ukraine dissatisfied and players from Russia and Belarus feeling like pariahs.

The tension on Sunday was in stark contrast to the otherwise festive feeling of the first day of the French Open. It is often one of the most joyous days of tennis, especially when the sky shimmers with that special shade of bright Parisian blue. There is no red like the red of the Roland Garros clay courts, no crowd as effortlessly elegant as this: the Panama hats, the silk spring dresses, the aperol sprites in pretty glasses in seemingly every other hand.

The absence of injured star Rafael Nadal, whose record of 14 men’s singles titles has made him synonymous with this event, is strange to everyone. But as Nadal said, tennis moves fast and waits for no one. The rousing roar whenever a French player was in action reverberated across the pitch as loudly as never before.

However, as Kostyuk and Sabalenka made clear, the war could make this tournament and tennis summer very different than ever before. On Monday, Elina Svitolina, one of the most successful players Ukraine has produced, will make her Grand Slam return from maternity leave against Italy’s Martina Trevisan. Ukraine’s Anhelina Kalinina, whose grandparents had to leave their home and whose childhood home was bombed, will play France’s Diane Parry in her first match on Tuesday after her emotional run to the final of this month’s Italian Open.

“Everyone is in a very different situation,” Kostyuk said in an interview on Sunday. “Whoever needs comfort, I am always there. We have a very good group.”

However, Kostyuk was the one who seemed to need some comfort in the moments after her game on Sunday. On the final point, she walked to shake hands with the chair umpire and then straight to her court seat. Sabalenka also shook hands with the chair umpire, then stood for a moment watching Kostyuk gather her belongings as the crowd’s restless noise began to rise.

Sabalenka said she initially thought it was a booing for her, but then realized it was for Kostyuk, wrongly, she added, explaining that she understands why the Ukrainian players don’t want to be seen shaking hands with a White -Russian or a Russian.

Kostyuk said she was shocked by the response, which was so different from a supportive reception in the United States this year when she refused to shake hands with a Russian opponent.

“I want people to respond to it in 10 years when the war is over,” she said. “I think they’re not going to feel really nice about what they’ve done.”

Kostyuk last visited Ukraine in March to see her father and grandfather. She traveled there after the Miami Open. The journey required four flights to get to Poland via her temporary home in Monte Carlo, a two-and-a-half hour train ride to the border, and then a six-hour car ride. She spent five days there, struggling to sleep amid the distant sounds of bomb-carrying drones that her relatives have somehow learned to live with. She said she still hadn’t recovered from the trip.

She woke up at 5 a.m. on Sunday to see a series of warnings on her phone about the latest drone strike on Kiev, the largest of the war. She said she tried not to look at her phone at night, but when she saw all the alerts, she couldn’t stop the urge to see what had happened.

A few hours later at Roland Garros, she prepared for her match with Sabalenka. To her surprise, she said, for the first time since the start of the war, she was not focused on her opponent’s nationality prior to a match against a Russian or Belarusian. It was refreshing, she said, and made her think that there would come a day when war would no longer encroach on her chosen profession, when every tennis match would be nothing more and nothing less.

Maybe one day, but definitely not on a Sunday.