A career milestone turned sour in seconds for Anna Kalinskaya, who reached the Roland Garros fourth round for the first time on Saturday. She beat Camila Osorio 6-3, 0-6, 6-2. What followed was one of the coldest handshakes Roland Garros has seen all tournament. 

When Kalinskaya walked toward Osorio for the customary handshake, she barely looked at her. There was no eye contact, there was no exchange, there was no warmth. The Colombian received it in kind. The reason for the mutually cold interaction had been unfolding on the court for much of the afternoon. 

In the second set, with Osorio serving at 0-4 and facing 40-0, Kalinskaya called for a medical timeout. A doctor and physio came onto the court, checked her vitals, and began icing her body as she sat in the chair. She looked visibly unwell, her body overheating in the scorching heat of the Paris afternoon. The Colombian waited. She had a set she was comprehensively winning, and it was halted at the worst time imaginable for the momentum to carry on.

Play resumed, and Anna Kalinskaya seemed to bounce back at a startling rate. She lost the second set but won the third 6-2 with a clarity and authority that didn’t always seem obvious for the player who looked like she couldn’t continue minutes before. It was enough to leave Osorio without an answer and without any goodwill toward her opponent when they met at the net. 

One of the journalists who covered the match put it plainly. “It’s surely Camila Osorio’s iciest post-match greeting. I get it to some extent because what happened with Kalinskaya was pretty bizarre. You don’t recover from heatstroke in minutes. But being objective, the Russian played better once she was past the trouble, and the Colombian slipped up by letting her pace drop in that first service game of the third set.”

The rules on medical timeouts allow for exactly what happened. Players may call them regardless of the score, and there is no way to challenge the authenticity of a call in-game. However, the optics were awkward, and Camila Osorio wasn’t doing anything to disguise the sentiment she had for them on the net. 

Kalinskaya had a personal cheer squad in the stands, too. Her dachshund Bella, who became something of a tour sensation after running onto the court to celebrate with her at the DC Open in Washington last summer, was in the crowd at Roland Garros to watch. It was a detail that added an unlikely warmth to a day that ended on anything but. 

Kalinskaya advances to fourth round for first time, faces Potapova

The result is a career milestone for the 27-year-old Russian. Her previous best performance at Roland Garros had been the second round in 2024, across six previous appearances at the tournament. She had never made it to week two in Paris before Saturday. The third round this year already bettered that, and the fourth round now awaits.

Anna Kalinskaya had gone through her first two rounds without dropping a set, beating Lois Boisson and Anna Korneeva comfortably before this match. Her clay-court record coming in wasn’t one that would instill much confidence, as she has never won a WTA title on the clay, with her sole singles title coming on indoor hard court at Midland in 2023.

But she had arrived at Roland Garros on the back of strong performances this season, reaching the quarterfinals at Qatar and Charleston as her best results in 2026. In October 2024, she achieved her highest ranking when she went on a breakout run to reach the Australian Open quarterfinal and the Dubai final, and finished with a ranking of world No. 11. She is currently ranked 24th. 

Her fourth-round opponent will be Anastasia Potapova, who produced the biggest upset of this Roland Garros on Saturday night by eliminating defending champion Coco Gauff in three sets. Potapova, who made it to the semifinals in Madrid this season, is one of the more in-form players on clay at the moment and gets into Paris as a result of a win that has turned the entire women’s draw upside down. 

Kalinskaya will carry confidence into the match, as the head-to-head stands in her favor at 2-0. However, the last time the two players met on tour was in 2022 at Cincinnati, which was a long time ago, and since then, both players have evolved.