Hénin-Hardenne Far Too Good for Pierce

Few champions have given adversity quite such a kicking as Justine Hénin-Hardenne. Two years ago she won the French Open against a backdrop of a family split and now she is champion again, a runaway winner against a hopelessly outclassed Mary Pierce of France, after a year during which she feared that illness may put an end to her career.

Poor Pierce. Not only was she run out of town, but she became so wayward at the approaching inevitability of her 6-1 6-1 defeat - the most decisive loss in a final here since Natasha Zvereva failed to win a game against Steffi Graf in 1988 - that at times she appeared to be having difficulty remembering how to grip her racket.

Later she discounted the suggestion she had been racked by nervousness, saying instead: 'Maybe I was a little too calm, too mellow.' Whatever the problem, she played abjectly at times, a fact exemplified by a simple overhead in the second game of the second set that hardly made it halfway up the net. 'Stop the fight,' growled a voice at the back of the press box.

At the awards ceremony, Pierce at first wept so copiously she was unable to speak, and then overcompensated with a stream of consciousness in which she apologised for playing so badly. She later explained: 'It's just a combination really of everything, and that's what I was saying in my speech.

'Right at that point I was sad that I had lost and sad the match went by so fast and I didn't play well. But I was happy at actually being able to stand there as a finalist in this tournament.'

Credit, though, to Hénin-Hardenne, who saved two match points in her fourth-round win against Svetlana Kuznetsova before completing the three-match run-in to the title without dropping a set. From where she summons her boiling competitive juices it is hard to tell.

The 23-year-old Belgian is barely knee-high to a chair umpire and has a frame that out of politeness is generally referred to as wiry. When she stood beside the much taller and more generously covered Pierce, who is 30, she looked like a youngster about to play tennis with the au pair.

Also, she admits the viral illness that meant she hardly played at all last year is still giving the doctors cause for concern. And yet she gave Pierce an utterly ruthless beating to extend her record since returning to the tour last March to 27 wins against one defeat.

After the match, the Roland Garros crowd heckled Hénin-Hardenne briefly, before more generously acknowledging her achievement. She might not have been the home champion most of them wanted, but at least the winner was a French speaker whose victory address was easily understood.

Pierce may fly the tricolour courtesy of a French mother but she was born, raised and is resident in North America and has an accent that is more speakeasy than boulevard café.

When Hénin-Hardenne addressed the crowd after she won here in 2003 by beating compatriot Kim Clijsters, she revealed the full details of the poignant story of the split that meant neither her father, Jose, nor either of her two brothers had come to Paris to watch her. She said later: 'When you lose the person you most loved at 12 years of age [a reference to her mother's death from cancer] it's terrible. But it gives you a lot of character.'

In 2002 she had married Pierre-Yves Hardenne and she now has a happy and stable private life.

She returned, though, to the sorrow of her mother's death yesterday and how it had affected her. 'I wouldn't be the same person with the same personality if I hadn't lost my mother pretty early,' Hénin-Hardenne said.

'So it's bad in a way, very sad in a way, but that made me stronger.' She spoke too about how her illness had changed her. She said: 'I think I probably enjoy my game more than before my illness. I enjoy every movement when I'm on the court. Every ball I hit, it's with my heart.'

The final started in bright sunshine, which lasted only as long as it took Pierce to hold serve relatively comfortably in the opening game. Clouds then gathered overhead, producing intermittent bursts of light rain, and Pierce's mood and play were soon reflecting the cheerless conditions.

Hénin-Hardenne had said before the match: 'She's going to try to take every opportunity to hit winners. She's not going to go for the long rallies - so it's going to be my job to make the points a little bit longer.'

It was another way of saying: 'Pierce is much bigger and heftier than me, not particularly mobile and her intention when she hits the ball is that it doesn't come back. If I can ride the blows and make her run around, I should be able to beat her.'

As it turned out, Pierce pulled and fluffed her punches with depressing regularity as the Belgian became, at number 10, the lowest seed to win the French title.

The course of the match turned conclusively Hénin-Hardenne's way when she won 14 points in a row in the first set to surge from one game down into a 3-1, 30-love lead. Her game was everything we have grown to expect it to be, wonderfully grooved groundstrokes that are now as devastating from the forehand wing as they have always been from the backhand.

Pierce, on the other hand, appeared to have left all the positive aspects of her game that had propelled her unexpectedly to her third final here - she lost in 1994 and won in 2000 - on the other side of Paris.

She double-faulted to surrender the first set in 24 minutes and if she thought things were going to get better she must have realised this was a forlorn hope when a string broke on her racket to hand Hénin-Hardenne a winning start to the second set.

The end came almost as a relief, as Pierce walked round the net to embrace Hénin-Hardenne - now the proud possessor of four grand-slam titles - and perhaps whisper in her ear: 'Thanks for putting me out of my misery so quickly.'