Nadal the Final Hurdle on Puerta's Rocky Rise to Top Level

Novelists love this sort of thing: man gets stuck in a lift, which then stops suddenly as it ascends to his top-floor apartment; man becomes worried by ominous noises and manages to squeeze to safety; moments later, cables snap and lift rockets to the ground; man goes on to find fame and fortune. Life is a game of chance, or a journey carefully choreographed by the hand of fate - you the reader decide.

The fame-and-fortune bit has still to be decided, although Mariano Puerta, who is that man in this particular story, has taken a significant step towards it by reaching his first grand-slam final, a match-up today against another left-hander, the compelling young Spaniard Rafael Nadal.

Puerta, a 26-year-old Argentine, says the lift incident, which happened in his apartment in Buenos Aires in December 2003, was 'pretty frightening, I really had a scare'. He needed hospital treatment for minor injuries to his head and arm. 'I was going through a difficult period, sort of a bad streak,' he says. 'It was just another bad thing that happened.'

Chance or fate? In Puerta's case we are dealing with a real situation, and fatalists may decide he was spared 18 months ago to turn up at Roland Garros this afternoon and win the most coveted prize in the clay-court game. In which case, stand by for an upset as big as any in recent tennis history as the unseeded Puerta tames the hottest player on the circuit, a 19-year-old with fire in his eyes and the fastest racket in the west - east, north and south.

One or two saw the unseeded Puerta coming, including the player himself. When he was told he had been drawn against Ivan Ljubicic in the first round, he said: 'That's going to be very tough - but if I beat him I'll make it to the semi-finals.' He thrashed Ljubicic in straight sets, the Croatian reeling under the venom of the big-swinging Argentine's heavily topspun groundstrokes. At least one of the more attentive members of the British media corps in Paris backed him at long odds before the tournament after being impressed by his clay-court form earlier in the year. (Clay-court form is the only form there is to judge him by in 2005, the 31 matches he has played so far all having been on dirt. Don't expect him to figure large at Wimbledon.) Others had marked him down as a man to watch after he reached 18 in the world at the age of 21, when he already had the upper-body build of a weightlifter and was doing his best to burst tennis balls every time he struck them.

It was after this that the bad things Puerta refers to waylaid him. He suffered a badly torn ligament in his wrist and in 2003 was banned for nine months after testing positive for clenbuterol, a drug used to treat asthma, a condition from which he suffers, that can also promote muscle growth. He says, though, there have been benefits from these experiences. 'When you go through a rough period, I'm sure that it just makes you become stronger. It's hard for people to sink you. Today, I can tell you, I feel very strong. I feel strong enough to confront a very difficult opponent.'

There is none more difficult at the moment than Nadal, the world number five from Majorca who marked his nineteenth birthday on Friday by bringing down the top seed, Roger Federer, in four sets.

Only those with little interest in tennis do not know by now what an exceptional player and athlete Nadal, a nephew of the former Barcelona footballer Miguel Angel Nadal, is: a competitor whose defensive qualities are of as high an order as his eye-catching attacking game, whose shot-making can be both robust and clever, and whose reserves of stamina are drawn from a deep well.

All this was common knowledge before the tour moved on to Paris at the end of last month. What had not yet been established was whether Nadal had the nerve to maintain his incredibly high standards at a grand slam, the four annual tournaments that define a player's true worth by asking as much of temperament as ability. Beyond the grand slams, few tournaments draw big crowds, none attracts the sort of gathering that sat around Court Philippe Chatrier on Friday in buzzing anticipation of Nadal v Federer.

The way Nadal conducted himself it was hard to believe this was only his sixth grand slam. There was one memorable passage of play when Federer stood at the net and three times Nadal drove balls at him with, it seemed, the intention of knocking the racket from his grasp - three times Federer volleyed the ball back, on the third occasion winning the point. Not a trace of deference or astonishment entered Nadal's expression, just a stare drilled straight between Federer's eyes that said: 'That's the last time you'll treat me like that.'

Whether it is chance or fate keeping the show on the road, expect Nadal to be crowned the new French champion this afternoon.