PARIS -- Hours before her opening-round match Sunday at the French Open, Marta Kostyuk received news that a missile strike had hit just 100 meters from her parents' home in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Kostyuk, the No. 15 seed, was visibly emotional at the end of her match -- a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Oksana Selekhmeteva -- and appeared to be crying in her chair before her on-court interview.
"I'm incredibly proud of myself today," Kostyuk said moments later. "I think it was one of the most difficult matches of my career. This morning, 100 meters away from my parents' house, a missile destroyed the building.
"It was a very difficult morning for me. I didn't know how this match was going to turn around for me. I didn't know how I would handle it."
Marta Kostyuk was visibly emotional after winning her first-round match at the French Open. She revealed that hours before the match, a missile struck near her parents' home in Kyiv. "It was one of the most difficult matches of my career," she said. AP Photo/Thibault Camus Russia engaged in a large-scale attack on the Ukrainian capital city Sunday morning, launching dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones. Ukrainian officials said four people were killed and 83 people were injured.
During her Sunday afternoon news conference, Kostyuk held up her phone and showed reporters a picture of the scene that she had received at 8 a.m. local time, three hours before the start of her match. She said her mother, sister and great-aunt were in the house when the missile struck.
Because she knew everyone in her family was physically unharmed, she said she never considered withdrawing from her match against Selekhmeteva but acknowledged it was hard to concentrate on tennis.
"I didn't know how my focus [was] going to be, how I'm going to be able to, you know, control my emotions or my thoughts," Kostyuk said. "There were obviously times in the match when I would go in back to thinking about it, because most of the morning I felt sick just for [the] thought that if it was 100 meters closer, I probably wouldn't have a mom and a sister today."
Firefighters extinguish a fire in an apartment building in Kyiv, Ukraine, partially destroyed by a Russian strike Sunday. Ukrainian officials said four people were killed and 83 people were injured. Oleksandr Gusev/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images Kostyuk, who has been outspoken about the Russian invasion of her home country since the conflict began in 2022, said this was the closest the fighting had been to her family home. While she admitted the first few months of the war had been the hardest emotionally "because of the unknownness," she said Sunday was one of the "top three worst ones."