Another Williams Is Ousted at Roland Garros, This Time Unsurprisingly

Playing in the same final-match slot on the same Court Philippe Chatrier where her sister Serena had blown a lead and lost in the first round the day before, Venus Williams could never manage to get a lead.

Radwanska, the third seed, broke Williams’s serve in the opening game and took it from there in a second-round French Open match. She counterpunched or, more often, countered the punches with deftly angled passing shots and crisply sliced drop shots as well as other survival tactics, like towering defensive lobs, that are rarely displayed in the shriek-filled, grip-and-rip world of 21st-century women’s tennis.

Williams would have needed her best, boldest game to deal with all this, but she did not come close. She must deal with the vagaries of Sjogren’s syndrome, the energy-sapping autoimmune disorder that turns every wake-up call into a form of roulette.

“I felt like I played; that pretty much sums it up,” Williams said after Radwanska’s 6-2, 6-3 victory.

Radwanska, a major star in her native Poland who is in the midst of her finest season at age 23, seized on all five of her break-point opportunities. She made only six unforced errors to Williams’s 33 and won 56 points to Williams’s 37.

The only time Radwanska showed any real displeasure was when she just missed what would have been a terrific sliding one-handed backhand winner near the net in the final game. She smashed the net cord with her racket, but that was only a brief detour on her path to victory.

“First of all, I have to say she played really well,” Williams said. “It’s important to put the ball in the court. She chased down a lot of balls. That’s what you have to do on this surface. Unfortunately, I wasn’t my best today.”

The only sister act still running at Roland Garros is the Radwanskas: Agnieszka’s younger sister, Urszula, plays in the second round on Thursday against No. 4 Petra Kvitova. This French Open is the first Grand Slam tournament in which both Venus and Serena Williams have played where neither has reached the third round.

“I wasn’t sure what my destiny was in this tournament, but I really wanted her to win; she’s been playing so well on clay,” Venus Williams said of Serena, who had been 46-0 in Grand Slam first-round matches until her shocking defeat on Tuesday to Virginie Razzano, a Frenchwoman ranked 111th.

“I think if she could have gotten through that match, it would have been, this tournament, a lot different for her,” Venus Williams said. “Thankfully, she has like twentysomething majors to keep her warm at night. I think she’ll be fine.”

For the record, Serena has 27 major titles: 13 in singles and 14 in doubles. But it still may take a while for her to recover, according to Oracene Price, the Williamses’ mother and coach. While Razzano returned to the grounds Wednesday for congratulatory French television interviews, Serena was not courtside to watch Venus.

“She hasn’t said anything to anybody, just locked her room,” Price said. “I know she’s disappointed.”

For now, Serena Williams still plans to play mixed doubles with Bob Bryan.

“Good partner,” Price said, smiling. “And she’s probably going to be angry at everybody and take it out on everyone on court.”

It was a rough day all around for the Americans and for Marion Bartoli, the eighth seed from France who was a semifinalist here last year but was upset in the second round Wednesday by Petra Martic of Croatia.

The American women started the tournament in surprisingly strong fashion, winning 10 of 12 first-round matches. But in the second round on Wednesday, six of them lost, including Melanie Oudin, the former United States Open quarterfinalist who earned a wild-card entry but was beaten, 6-2, 6-3, by Sara Errani, the 21st seed from Italy.

The only American woman to win was 19-year-old Sloane Stephens, who defeated her compatriot Bethanie Mattek-Sands, 6-1, 6-1. Stephens’s next match is against unseeded Mathilde Johansson of France.