By Andy Murray is set to team up with Dan Evans in the French Open doubles as he ramps up preparations for his Olympics bid.
Murray has been practising on clay after avoiding the need for surgery on the two ankle ligaments he damaged in Miami back in March, raising hopes that he might play Roland Garros for only the second time in seven years.
The top singles players are automatically entered into the draw, so Murray is on the entry list, but i understands that he has also entered the doubles tournament and, if fit in time, will play with British No 3 Dan Evans as part of his preparations for the Olympics in July, where the tennis will also be held at Roland Garros.
Murray, 36, said in an interview with The Times that he would play the Olympics “genuinely only if I felt like there was a chance of winning a medal”, and in reality that chance only exists in doubles.
Team GB captain Leon Smith is understood to be lining up Murray as partner to top-10 doubles player Joe Salisbury at the Olympics once again. The pair lost in a razor-tight quarter-final at the Games three years ago in Tokyo.
Medal chances
Team GB doubles guru Louis Cayer has worked with Murray on and off in recent months on some technical elements and would be a willing confidant in the doubles format.
Murray has previous at the Olympics too. A double gold medallist in the singles, he also won mixed doubles silver with Laura Robson at London 2012. In the men’s doubles three years ago, he and Salisbury were beaten in a deciding tie-break by the Croatian team of Nikola Mektic and Mate Pavic, a pair brought together by the national federation with the specific goal of winning Olympic gold – which they did.
That is one reason the Olympic doubles is a little different: Mektic and Pavic is an outlier. The majority of doubles players do not play with someone from their own country week-to-week, and therefore have to switch partner for the Games.
Ideally, Murray would play the French Open with Salisbury in order to provide an added level of simulation, but he and regular partner Rajeev Ram of the USA are one of the top-ranked pairs in the world and will expect to challenge for the title.
For all Murray’s commitment to Olympic preparations, he will not expect or even want to play more than a few matches in the doubles draw, especially if he still has concerns about his ankle and with the grass-court season looming. So the partnership with Evans, who will also prioritise singles and perhaps an early switch to the grass if that ends after a round or two, is a convenient one.
There is of course a caveat will all of this. The Olympics is important to Murray, and playing the same last French Open as Rafael Nadal would be a special moment, but the grass is the priority. If there is even a hint that playing in Paris could impede his chances of giving a good account of himself at Wimbledon, he will abandon ship with few regrets.
The plan to pair Murray with Salisbury at the Olympics leaves Evans to play his first Games with world No 10 Neal Skupski, although that is a happy coincidence. The same pair clinched a dramatic victory for Great Britain over Australia in the Davis Cup last year, saving four match points to earn the team a place at the Finals in Malaga.
Evans and Skupski also had a stint as a tour team, reaching two Masters 1000 finals in the space of a month in April 2021.
Their success had British bosses dreaming of two potential medal-winning teams in Tokyo, only for Evans to test positive for Covid just 10 days before the Games began. A reprise of that team in Paris should not be underestimated.
