It was a heart-tugging moment: As Francesca Schiavone went down to defeat in the first round of the French Open, the tournament organisers announced she was retiring, and the crowd had seen her last Roland Garros campaign.
But one person didn’t feel very warm and sentimental: Schiavone. The retirement was news to her.
Roland Garros’s Twitter feed had carried the announcement. The tweet was quickly deleted, but several reporters took the information into the news conference room after Schiavone’s 6-2 6-4 loss to Kristina Mladenovic.
“Roland Garros announced my retirement, but I didn’t,” Schiavone told them. “So you can stand up, all of you, and go back to work in the office, because I didn’t say that.”
Schiavone lifted the Suzanne Lenglen Cup at the 2010 French Open and was runner-up in 2011. She turns 36 next month, an age when tennis players start hanging up their racquets. But Schiavone would prefer not to be hurried along.
“I will announce when I will want to stop,” she said.
“When I finished, everybody stood up. I say, I don’t know if it’s respect, I love, I appreciate this situation. But I think that everybody thought this because Roland Garros announced it. It was not the last one for me.”
Next up for the 26th-seeded Mladenovic is American Samantha Crawford.

Lepchenko tight-lipped on meldonium claim
America’s Varvara Lepchenko refused to comment yesterday on claims that she served a ‘silent ban’ after testing positive for meldonium, the drug which has put Maria Sharapova’s career on hold.
The Uzbekistan-born world number 64 didn’t play on the WTA Tour from February to May.
The reason, according to allegations made by Russian physio Anatoly Glebov, was that she had tested positive for 1mg of meldonium.
However, as that is below the limit set by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) she was allowed to return to competition in Rome earlier this month.
Eight times Lepchenko was asked to address the allegations, but eight times she refused after losing to Russia’s Ekaterina Makarova at the French Open yesterday.
“At the moment I have no comment on any of this. I’m here just to answer tennis questions. If you have any questions about my match, I would gladly answer them,” she said.
“But otherwise, I just have no comments.”
Sharapova was suspended in March after she revealed she had tested positive for meldonium at the Australian Open in January.