As a wise man once said, what happened in Monte-Carlo happened, what happened in Barcelona happened, what happened in Madrid happened—and here we are, we are in Rome. In the heart of the clay season, we flock to the Foro Italico. (Your correspondent will be there next week; come say hello at a book event I’m doing on the evening of the 16th at Shell Libreria Bistrot.)

As we watch Italy’s biggest tournament, it’s an apt time to appreciate two great feats of one of its players. This week, Jasmine Paolini set a record: the first Italian woman to log 100 weeks ranked in the top 10. (Hers happen to be consecutive, which increases the degree of difficulty, but it’d be a record even if they weren’t.) There have been Italian Slam champs, of course, but no player had ever held on to an elite ranking for quite this long. Paolini first rose into the top 10 with her astonishing 2024 campaign, where she made two Slam finals, and she followed it up with a more understated but excellent 2025. The high point of last year was Rome, where she became the first Italian player, man or woman, to win Rome in 40 years and followed it up with a sincere, contagiously happy celebration.

But these two facts—the ranking record and the Rome title—come into tension this week. The 2026 season has been rough for Paolini, and her return to the Foro Italico means that she’s dropping the 1,000 ranking points she earned as a champion, while facing pressure from potential risers. To remain in the top 10, she will likely have to make a deep run on her home dirt. Looking ahead, she could be due for a big falloff by the end of the clay season. Given that Paolini’s rise was so dramatic and unheralded, and that her buoyant personality functions as a kind of tennis antidepressant for colleagues, journalists, and fans alike, I want to keep tabs on the situation here.

At time of writing, Paolini has not resembled a top 10 player in 2026. She hasn’t won three matches in a row. She has beaten only one player ranked in the top 50 (the venerable Laura Siegemund, No. 47). She also has lost to three players ranked outside the top 50. She wept during a straight-set loss to Zeynep Sonmez in Stuttgart in April. It has been more than two months since Paolini has logged a straight-set victory. 

The wins she does manage tend to be arduous. On Thursday she played her first match in Rome, against No. 127 Leolia Jeanjean; it took three sets and nearly three hours to win, and she hit 57 unforced errors along the way. After the match, Paolini pointed out that her title campaign last year also had its “ups and downs,” which included falling down a set and 3–0 against Diana Shnaider in the quarterfinal, before a fortuitous rain delay. But her season has been defined by downs, mostly. And it makes you wonder whether the ups are coming anytime soon, and whether her reign at the top is due to end after a brilliant, anomalous two-year run.

Tennis is always unforgiving, but I daresay this is especially true for our short champions, whose game is viable only as long as their extreme athleticism can sustain it. Once that slips, they don’t have easy power or cheap points to fall back on. It’s premature to say whether this is the exact situation with Paolini, whose game looks out of sorts in a way that is hard to pin down, and may have as much to do with the psychology as it does with physical deterioration. But if you’ve seen her play, you know that much of her genius has to do with her sprightly all-court style, and the way she Super Ball-style bounces off the court to strike balls at well above shoulder height. She is now 30 years old, which was about the time that Diego Schwartzman, her kin in stature, fell off a cliff too. It’s too soon to get apocalyptic. Perhaps she just needs some stability in the player’s box, after firing two coaches in 2025, hiring a third, and then bringing in her friend and doubles partner Sara Errani as a secondary coach. But whatever she needs, she needs to find it soon, because after the Rome points fall off, she also has a fourth-round appearance at Roland-Garros to defend.