Lola Radivojević Eliminated from Roland Garros Qualifiers Serbia’s top-ranked woman, 19-year-old Lola Radivojević, arrived in Paris hoping Roland Garros qualifying would be her springboard to a first Grand Slam main draw. Instead, it turned into a harsh reality check and a political Rorschach test back home.

How the match unraveled

In the second round of qualifying, Radivojević ran into Belgium’s Greet Minnen and never really found a foothold. Minnen stormed through the first set 6–1, grabbing the first five games before the Serbian could even get on the board. The pattern barely shifted in the second: after an early exchange of breaks and a brief 2–2 balance, the Belgian “was the only player on the court,” pulling away to seal a 6–2 set and a 2–0 win that pushed her into the final qualifying round.

Pro-government sports media dialed the drama to eleven, branding it “DESPAIR FOR SERBIAN TENNIS” and insisting “we couldn’t have gotten worse news before Roland Garros.” They underscored the scale of the loss, stressing that Minnen, the No. 167 in the world and 32nd seed in qualifying, “celebrated with a convincing score of 6:1, 6:2, after only an hour and seven minutes of play.”

Diverging spins in Belgrade

Opposition-leaning outlets took a cooler, matter‑of‑fact line: “Serbia’s top tennis player out of French Open,” one headline noted, summarizing simply that Radivojević had “ended her participation in the French Open qualifiers” after Minnen’s straight‑sets win.

Both sides, however, converge on two key takeaways: Radivojević must “wait longer for her Grand Slam main draw debut,” and Serbia’s hopes in Paris now rest on Teodora Kostović, the other Serbian still fighting through the second round of qualifying.

In the space of just over an hour in Paris, a routine qualifying loss became, depending on who’s talking, either a national sporting crisis or a sober reminder of how steep the road to the top really is.