Sánchez and Ustero make their Paris chance count

Claudia Fernández and Martina Calvo went through the opening set of Sunday’s Paris Major final without earning a break point. Under the closed roof of Philippe Chatrier, Ari Sánchez and Andrea Ustero gave them little time to find a way into the match. After taking that set six games to two, the third seeds won the second without losing a game, completing their first Major title together in an hour and 11 minutes.

It was an unusually comfortable finish to a tournament that had asked rather more of its champions. Sánchez and Ustero left Roland Garros with their third title of the season, following Riyadh and Valencia, and a result that gives substance to their ambitions for the rest of the year. They had already shown they could reach a Major final. Now they have won one, with a performance their opponents had no answer to.

The quarter final against Alejandra Salazar and Aranzazu Osoro had required three sets, with Sánchez and Ustero winning the decider six games to two after losing the second. Their next match was more awkward still. Marta Ortega and Sofia Araújo took the first set of the semi final seven games to five, leaving the eventual champions needing both of the remaining sets to stay in the tournament. They won them six games to four and six games to one.

Those two afternoons belong in the assessment of the title as much as the final does. Sánchez and Ustero had to recover when a match moved away from them, then return the next day and do it again. By Sunday they had earned the opportunity to play from in front. The ease of the final should not obscure the work needed to reach it, or encourage the expectation that future tournaments will finish as smoothly.

Fernández and Calvo had arrived in the final with good reason to believe they could win. On Saturday they beat the defending champions, Gemma Triay and Delfi Brea, six games to four and six games to two. That gave them a second victory in three meetings with the world number ones and a third final in just four tournaments together. Calvo was 18 and Fernández 20, making them the youngest pair to reach a Major final.

Their previous finals had come in Pretoria and London, their first two events as a partnership. Reaching another at Roland Garros put the Paris defeat in a more useful context. A young team that keeps returning to the last match of a tournament has given itself regular opportunities to play for the biggest rewards. They will need to understand why this final became so difficult, while retaining what had worked well enough to take them past Triay and Brea the day before.

Triay and Brea, meanwhile, have a much longer record behind them. They came to Paris after winning their sixth title of the season in Madrid and had taken four of the five Majors played since they joined forces at the start of 2025. A semi final defeat does not make that consistency disappear. It does, however, give their pursuers another reason to approach these meetings with confidence, particularly when Fernández and Calvo have now beaten them more than once.

Paula Josemaría and Bea González also left Paris earlier than their seeding suggested they might. The second seeds lost in the quarter finals to Ortega and Araújo, who saved five match points before winning the last two sets on tie breaks. That left the women’s draw without either of its top two pairs by the final. Ortega and Araújo’s part in the week matters too: the danger for the leading teams extended beyond the four pairs at the top of the draw.

For Ustero, the result also followed a less straightforward stretch of the season than a list of titles would suggest. Injury had kept her out of Málaga and Pretoria. The victory in Paris gave her and Sánchez a substantial success after that interruption, rather than leaving them to measure their progress only against the level they had reached beforehand. Their earlier Major final in Rome had ended without the trophy; this time they had the satisfaction of finishing the job.

There had been signs of what the partnership could become from its first tournament. In Riyadh, Sánchez and Ustero recovered from losing the opening set to beat Triay and Brea in three. Closing that final took eight match points, a reminder of how difficult the last part of a winning performance can be. Paris offered a much calmer conclusion, although the ability to recover from a setback had been needed again earlier in the week.

Valencia provided another important result between those two titles. Sánchez and Ustero beat Triay and Brea in the semi finals, then overcame Fernández and Araújo in a final that went to a deciding set. Taken together, their victories show that the Paris opportunity was earned by a pair already capable of winning against strong opposition. The task now is to produce those results often enough to make each title feel less like a separate breakthrough.

Sánchez has her own experience of doing that at Roland Garros. She won the Paris title with Josemaría in 2023 and 2024, and has now won it with Ustero. The familiar venue therefore carried a different significance for each of Sunday’s champions. For Sánchez it was another successful visit with a new partner; for Ustero it was a first Major title, achieved alongside someone who already knew what winning there required.

With Dubai on the November calendar, the autumn offers more opportunities to see whether the pairs challenging Triay and Brea can sustain their results. Paris has given that contest added interest, even if one tournament cannot settle how the season will end. Sánchez and Ustero leave with the most to celebrate. After the difficult matches that preceded it, they finished the week with a final in which their first Major together was secured as comfortably as they could have wished.