Djokovic fights back in French Open opener to keep major chase alive

Novak Djokovic took the kind of early hit that can expose a 39-year-old in the opening round of a major, then answered it with the sort of stubborn adjustment that still keeps his 25th Grand Slam bid alive.

Djokovic beat 22-year-old Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard 5-7, 7-5, 6-1, 6-4 at Court Philippe-Chatrier in Paris, surviving nearly three hours against a 6-foot-7 French power server who had the crowd behind him. The win kept Djokovic’s remarkable French Open opening-round streak intact and marked his record 82nd Grand Slam appearance, but the match also offered a sharper read on his current margin than the final score alone.

The first set showed how thin that margin can look when Djokovic is short on clay-court mileage. Mpetshi Perricard broke at 5-5, helped by a Djokovic double fault, then closed the set with back-to-back aces, including one clocked at 223 kph, or 139 mph. Djokovic was forced onto the defensive in front of a partisan Paris crowd and had to absorb the kind of noise and pace that can quickly become a problem against bigger hitters.

That rust is not a mystery. This was only Djokovic’s second clay-court match of 2026, after a loss to Croatian qualifier Dino Prižmić at the Italian Open following a two-month layoff because of a right shoulder injury. The limited build-up mattered in the first set, when timing looked uneven and Mpetshi Perricard’s serve repeatedly pushed Djokovic outside his preferred court position.

The response was more revealing than the stumble. Djokovic finally broke through in the second set after 10 break-point chances, a grind that showed both his patience and the strain his body and timing were under. Once he levelled the match, he pulled away in the third set and kept control in the fourth, using the longer exchanges to blunt Mpetshi Perricard’s first-strike game.

The result was also significant historically. Djokovic had not lost a set at the French Open since 2010, when Evgeny Korolev last managed it, and he had not lost a first-round Grand Slam match in 20 years. That combination of records still stands, but this opener suggested a narrower pathway ahead. If Djokovic is to keep moving toward another title in Paris, the question is no longer just whether he can survive the early rounds. It is how much he has to spend to do it.

Valentin Royer, another French player, is next. After a match like this, that will be a better test of how far Djokovic can stretch the remainder of the tournament than the scoreline in the opener ever could.