from the official Roland Garros website by Eric Salliot
29 April 2004

Juan Carlos Ferrero will soon return to the site of the sweetest success of his career. Since winning at Roland Garros last year, El Mosquito has soared to unprecedented heights, but there are signs that he is starting to fall back down to Earth just at the wrong time. Will the reigning champion be able to recover and hang on to his title?

If Juan Carlos Ferrero seemed to coast to victory in last year’s French Open Final, it was perhaps because he had already played that match many times before in his dreams – lifting the Musketeer’s Cup had always been his greatest ambition, and inexperienced Dutchman Martin Verkerk could do little to stop the Spaniard claiming it in straight sets (6-1, 6-3, 6-2).
The rest of the tournament had not gone so smoothly for Ferrero. He flirted with failure in the quarter-final, when Chile’s Fernando Gonzalez took him to five sets before going down 6-4 in the fifth, and in the semi-final Ferrero came face to face with Albert Costa, the man who had inflicted a heart-breaking defeat on him in the 2002 final. Happily for the Valencia native, he held his nerve to claim his spot in history.

Winning the French Open allowed Ferrero to lay to rest the ghosts of previous flops, and he has since gone on to sweep all before him. On 6 September, he achieved the ultimate by beating home-crowd favourite Andre Agassi in the semi-finals of the US Open and thereby graduating to the rank of World no. 1 for the very first time. True, he was then beaten in the final by Andy Roddick, but he could still claim to be the best player in the world.

The beginning of the end at Bercy
The Spaniard’s reign at the top was, however, only to last for 8 weeks as fatigue eventually took its toll. At first, there seemed to be no danger of a collapse, since he still had enough strength to beat arch-rival Roger Federer on his way to clinching the Madrid Masters Series, but it transpired that he was unable to sustain that standard. At the BNP Paribas Masters at Bercy, his quarter-final loss to Jiri Novak meant he had to surrender his No. 1 spot. He could have recovered it at the Masters Cup in Houston but he cut a jaded figure as he was dispatched in the pool matches by Nalbandian, Agassi and Federer.

Ferrero would probably have liked to have taken some time off at that point, but there was to be no let-up in his hectic schedule as he journeyed to Australia in early December to play for his country in the Davis Cup Final. He came close to toppling Lleyton Hewitt on the first day, as he tore into a 2-1 lead, however, he had pushed his weary body to its limits and was obliterated 7-0 in the fourth set tie-breaker before tamely losing the fifth set. On the Sunday, he lost another marathon game, this time to big-hitting Mark Philippoussis, who was spurred on by the tremendous home support to demolish Ferrero 6-0 in the fifth set – hardly a fitting way to finish what was a splendid year for the Spaniard.

If 2003 ended in disappointment, 2004 has not been much better for Ferrero, principally because he did not take enough time out to recharge his batteries. He did manage to battle to the semi-finals of the Australian Open, but once there, a combination of fatigue and sore adductors meant he found his old foe Federer too strong and succumbed in straight sets (6/4, 6/1, 6/4).

Victory seems to be eluding him at the moment, even on clay. He lost in the Rotterdam final and then had to pull out of Indian Wells and the Miami Masters Series after being struck down with chicken pox.

More disappointment was to follow when he returned to his home town of Valencia only to be ousted in the semi-finals by young left-hander Fernando Verdasco. On April 20, he seemed to hit rock bottom, when he was eliminated (6-2, 6-3) in the first round of the Monte-Carlo Masters by fellow-Spaniard Alex Corretja, an ageing player who is not even ranked in the world’s top 100.

Afterwards, a frustrated Ferrero refused to speak to the press. Today, a few weeks away from his return to Roland Garros, Juan Carlos’s grip on the Musketeer’s Cup seems less than tight. Nevertheless, he still has time to recover his self-confidence and get himself in shape before be begins his bid to recapture last year’s glory. Based on last year’s performances, he will be one of the favourites whatever happens between now and then.