Naomi Osaka's Roland Garros 2026: The Comeback With Swiatek's Old Coach

Three days before Roland Garros begins, Naomi Osaka is alone on a side practice court, firing flat backhands at a target chalked onto the baseline. You can almost hear the rhythm of it — thwack, bounce, thwack. Behind her, down the players' lounge corridor, her two-year-old daughter Shai is being walked between meeting rooms by someone on the family team. And a few metres away, a tall, serious-looking Polish coach is timing the rallies on his phone, saying nothing, watching everything.

That coach is Tomasz Wiktorowski. If the name doesn't land right away, the work will: for three years, between 2021 and the start of 2024, he stood on the other side of the net at this exact venue and built the player who won three of these Roland Garros titles in a row — Iga Swiatek. He turned up on Osaka's team in August 2025, just after she split from Patrick Mouratoglou. Ten weeks later, Osaka was in a US Open semi-final, her first Grand Slam semi since 2021. She has now spent six months learning how this man thinks about clay.

And clay, of all things, is the one part of tennis Osaka has never solved.

Sit with that for a second. Four-time Slam champion. Two Australian Opens. Two US Opens. Six trips to Roland Garros — and not one of them got her past the third round. Paris is the only major she has never figured out, and it is the one she is now walking into carrying the exact blueprint Wiktorowski used to make his last player look untouchable on the stuff.

This is the quietest serious comeback in the women's draw. Almost nobody is writing about it. That, honestly, is what makes it worth your time.

The slam she has never figured out

Here's the gap, and it's wider than you'd guess. The numbers, quickly:

• Roland Garros appearances: 6 (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2024, 2025)
• Best result: 3rd round (2016, 2019)
• Career match wins at Roland Garros: 7
• Career match wins at the Australian Open: 22, with 2 titles
• Career match wins at the US Open: 31, with 2 titles
• Career match wins at Wimbledon: 6

Read those last few lines again. Osaka has won more matches in a single US Open than she has across her entire Roland Garros career. This isn't a riddle waiting to be solved — it's a known, named weakness, and she knows it better than anyone.

The why isn't a mystery either. Osaka's whole game was built on flat power: a heavy first serve, a two-handed backhand that steals time from whoever's across the net, a forehand that ends points before the rally has a chance to get away from her. On hard courts the ball zips through the surface and that style sings. On red clay, where rallies stretch out and the ball sits up higher and slower, the same shapes turn against her. First-strike tennis just isn't the language Paris rewards.

And last year it got ugly. Her 2025 Roland Garros first-round loss to Paula Badosa — 6-7(1), 6-1, 6-4 — was the most painful single match of her clay career. Fifty-four unforced errors. A first set right there in her hands, gone. In the press conference afterward she didn't dress it up; she owned the surface problem out loud. Then she packed up, left Paris, and flew to North America to start rebuilding from the ground.

Why this Roland Garros is different: Wiktorowski

The thing about Tomasz Wiktorowski is that he doesn't make noise — he makes champions. He coached Polish No. 1 Agnieszka Radwanska to a Wimbledon final and the Top 5 back in the 2010s. Then in late 2021 he took over Iga Swiatek, steered her through the run that produced the 2022, 2023 and 2024 Roland Garros titles, took her to world No. 1, and kept her there for 71 weeks straight. Outside the Nadal coaching tree, no active coach has a deeper résumé on clay. Full stop.

So when he and Swiatek parted in late 2024, everyone on tour assumed the same thing: he'd take a year off, then resurface on some top-five player's bench. Instead, in July 2025, he started a trial with Osaka — ranked outside the top 50, two and a half years older than his last star, a totally different game shape, and a body that had just produced a child. On paper it made no sense. That's part of what makes it interesting.

Osaka has said her first impression of him was that he looked "very scary." And then she says the truth of him is the exact opposite: warm, patient, technically obsessed, happy to talk about one single shot for twenty minutes after practice has ended. He runs her sessions in the same order he ran Swiatek's. Early ball position. Depth. And that kick second serve Swiatek used to neutralise returners on clay.

Hold on to that last one, because it's the whole ballgame. Osaka's second serve has been a soft spot her entire four-Slam career — a flat second ball averaging 150 km/h that sits up like a gift for a good returner. Wiktorowski's signature fix, with both Radwanska and Swiatek, was a heavier kick second serve that climbs above the shoulder, and it bites hardest on slow surfaces. If that change holds up under real match pressure across two weeks of best-of-three, Osaka stops being the opponent everyone has scouted. She becomes someone new.

2024: the return that nobody quite mapped

You probably remember the headline more than the tennis. Osaka came back to the tour in January 2024, six months after giving birth to Shai in July 2023, and the return was slow by her own standards. First or second round in Brisbane, Auckland, Melbourne. She showed up at Roland Garros 2024 ranked outside the top 130, beat Lucia Bronzetti 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 in the first round — her first French Open win since 2021 — and then ran straight into a peak Swiatek, losing in three in the second round. By year's end she'd clawed back to the top 60.

Most of that year was just the quiet grind of a mother finding her game again. The noise around her had gone soft. The story everyone wanted to write — Osaka as the highest-profile Black mother returning from maternity leave to elite tennis — was the one she didn't want written. She'd rather the work talk for her.

And in 2025, the work started talking again, loudly. By the US Open she was up to No. 24. She'd parted with Patrick Mouratoglou after eighteen months — no bitterness, she's been clear about that, the methodology just wasn't what she needed at this stage — and was three weeks into the Wiktorowski trial. Then came New York, and New York did the talking for her.

The 2025 US Open run that changed the conversation

This is the fortnight that flipped the room back around. Osaka reached the semi-finals at the 2025 US Open. She beat Karolina Muchova in three sets in the third round. Then she took apart 2023 US Open champion Coco Gauff 6-3, 6-2 in the fourth round — her first top-five win at a Slam in her entire career. If you were watching, you felt it: the Gauff match was the first time in years that Arthur Ashe tilted back toward Osaka. She rode that momentum clean through the quarter-final.

The semi-final loss to Amanda Anisimova — 6-7(4), 7-6(3), 6-3 — was exactly the kind of three-set heartbreak that, in her younger years, would have eaten at her for months. This time she just let it go. Her on-court interview was generous about Anisimova and short about herself. "I can't be mad," she said. And it didn't sound like a line she'd practiced — it sounded like someone who'd finally reached the place where a single loss doesn't decide who she is.

After the Open she was back in the WTA top 20 for the first time since January 2022. She closed 2025 in the top 15. She extended the Wiktorowski partnership through 2026. And she booked the clay swing — on purpose.

Clay 2026: Madrid and Rome added more than they took away

The clay season hasn't been a fairy tale. It's been better than that — it's been evidence.

Madrid Open (April): Osaka came in as the No. 14 seed, took a first-round bye, then beat Camila Osorio 6-2, 7-5 in the second round. That was her first clay win of 2026 and, somehow, her first win past the second round at Madrid in her whole career. She lost the next match in the third round — but watch the Osorio win, because it points somewhere. She stayed in the long rallies. She won 11 of 13 first-serve points in her opening service game. And only twice all match did she bail out to that heavy flat first ball that has always been her clay-court tell.

Italian Open (May): Osaka beat Cristina Bucsa, then a qualifier, then one more to reach the round of 16. Waiting for her there? Iga Swiatek — her own coach's former protégée, the woman who's won three of the last four Roland Garros titles. Swiatek won 6-2, 6-1 in 1 hour and 22 minutes. The scoreline looks brutal. The lessons buried inside it were not.

Because all match long, Osaka did the thing Wiktorowski keeps asking for: she stayed in the rally, took the ball earlier, refused to fall back on first-strike tennis when the point dragged on. Swiatek won because she was the better clay player that night — no shame in that. But Osaka had reached a Rome round of 16, the best result of her career at the Italian Open, and she'd handed the man holding her current credentials 90 minutes of forensic detail on how to dismantle the very player most likely to be standing in her Roland Garros draw.

And the Rome run dropped one quiet confirmation right in our laps: the kick second serve is working. Osaka held serve 89% of the time across her four matches — higher than any clay tournament of her professional life.

What the draw might give her at Roland Garros 2026

Osaka is seeded No. 14 at Roland Garros 2026, and a seed like that maps out a path that probably runs something like this:

• Round 1: a lower-ranked player or qualifier. Osaka should win.
• Round 2: someone ranked roughly 40-60. Dangerous, but winnable.
• Round 3: an opponent in the 25-40 range. The historical wall.
• Round 4: probably a top-eight seed. The first real test for a player who's never gone this deep here.
• Quarter-final: another top-five player. Brand-new territory.

The first three rounds will tell you the whole story. Osaka has lost in the third round of Roland Garros twice, and in the first or second round every other time she's shown up. The question in Paris was never "can she beat a top player on red clay" — it's "can she reach the second weekend without coming apart, mentally or tactically." And this Wiktorowski-built version of her game is the most likely answer she's ever brought.

If the bracket plays nice, that fourth round serves up an Aryna Sabalenka or a Coco Gauff — and either one is the exact test she has never passed at the Slam she has never won. The Sabalenka version is the juicier one. Sabalenka came into Roland Garros 2026 as the WTA world No. 1 with a publicly stated 18-month wedding timeline that bought her two extra years to keep winning Slams. Her power tends to lose its edge in the clay slowness. And Osaka, on a good day, can trade blows with anyone alive.

The off-court architecture

The Osaka coming back to Roland Garros in 2026 is not the woman who arrived in 2018, and you feel it everywhere. There's a daughter now. There are brand campaigns that have quietly normalised her struggles with mental health and motherhood — her OLLY wellness campaign is one of the more honest sponsorship rollouts this sport has ever produced. And there's a Louis Vuitton ambassadorship that, almost by accident, has made her one of the most visible Black women in the entire European luxury-fashion world.

She also runs a sports-media company, Hana Kuma, co-founded with her long-time agent Stuart Duguid and LeBron James's SpringHill. It has put out documentary work and tilted Osaka toward the producer's side of tennis culture — which turns out to be a smart place to stand for a player whose 2021 and 2022 mental-health withdrawals made her one of the most over-discussed athletes of her era.

So here's where it lands in 2026: Osaka is rebuilding the playing side of her career from inside a personal infrastructure that mostly didn't exist when she won her first Slam. The maternity break is what gave her the time to build it. And the clay swing is the first time we've watched her compete with the whole thing finally in place.

Confirmed, and what is just mood

Let's be straight about what we actually know versus what's just hope in the air.

Confirmed: Osaka has six career Roland Garros appearances, no result past the third round (her best: third round in 2016 and 2019). Confirmed: she returned from maternity leave in January 2024 after the birth of her daughter Shai in July 2023. Confirmed: she split from Patrick Mouratoglou in July 2025 and began working with Tomasz Wiktorowski at the Canadian Open in August 2025. Confirmed: she reached the semi-finals at the 2025 US Open, beating Coco Gauff 6-3, 6-2 in the fourth round and losing to Amanda Anisimova in three sets in the semi-final. Confirmed: she has continued the Wiktorowski partnership through 2026. Confirmed: at the 2026 Madrid Open she beat Camila Osorio in the second round (her first 2026 clay win); at the 2026 Italian Open she reached the round of 16 before losing to Iga Swiatek 6-2, 6-1. Confirmed: she is the No. 14 seed at Roland Garros 2026.

Confirmed by Osaka herself: she first thought Wiktorowski "looked very scary," and has since said his actual presence on court is "warm" and "friendly." She described her 2025 US Open semi-final loss to Anisimova by saying she "can't be mad."

Just mood: whether that kick second serve will truly hold across a best-of-three Slam under match pressure. Just mood: any specific 2026 Roland Garros draw outcome (the draw is being held on Thursday, May 21). Just mood: any of the predictions floating around about Osaka winning a Slam in 2026 — nobody is making that claim seriously, her own team included.

The bottom line

Here's the thing — Naomi Osaka doesn't need Roland Garros to validate her career. She has four Slams. She has the next two decades of brand income locked in. At 28, she has the longest comeback runway of any returning mother in the top fifty.

But she does need Roland Garros to mean something. It's the slam she has never solved. It's the slam her current coach used to own. And it's the slam that, if she goes deep at it in 2026, would write this whole comeback story more cleanly than another US Open title ever could.

Nobody outside her team is predicting it. And if you've followed Osaka long enough, you know that's exactly the kind of arc she's always rewarded most — the one that creeps in quietly, while the cameras are pointed at somebody else, and only becomes obvious once you're already in the second week.

Sources

• WTA: Rankings Watch — Anisimova makes Top 5 debut, Osaka returns to Top 20
• WTA: Osaka splits with coach Patrick Mouratoglou, will trial with Tomasz Wiktorowski
• US Open: Naomi Osaka blitzes past Coco Gauff into 2025 US Open quarterfinal
• US Open: Naomi Osaka upbeat after 2025 US Open semifinal defeat
• Roland Garros official: US Open 2025 — Osaka back where she belongs
• Tennis.com: Naomi Osaka exits Roland Garros in the first round with a loss to Paula Badosa
• Tennis.com: Naomi Osaka's win over Coco Gauff shows the progress she's made with coach Tomasz Wiktorowski
• Tennis.com: Rome previews — Can Naomi Osaka finish what she started against Iga Swiatek?
• Olympics.com: Italian Open 2026 — Iga Świątek breezes past Naomi Osaka to book spot in quarter-finals
• Tennis World USA: Madrid — Naomi Osaka wins first match on clay in 2026
• TIME: Welcome Back, Naomi Osaka
• Roland-Garros 2026 official entry list

Photo credits

Hero: "Naomi Ōsaka 20220920a21 cropped" by 江戸村のとくぞう / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 Inline portrait: "NaomiOsaka-smile-2020 (cropped tight)" / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0