A Wildcard's First Real Exam: Emanuela Lares Meets a Frayed Elsa Jacquemot

The Kia Open in Barranquilla opens with the kind of first-round pairing that tournament directors love and tidy-minded analysts distrust. On one side of the net is Emanuela Lares, a home wildcard whose recent tennis has been played almost entirely against other juniors. On the other is Elsa Jacquemot, a professional who has been through the summer hard-court swing and come out the other side with very little to show for it, except a hard-earned win in qualifying two days ago. The hard court is the same for both of them; almost nothing else is.

Lares Arrives With Momentum That Nobody Can Quite Measure

Lares comes in on a genuine little run. She reached the final at the J100 in Medellín, where she lost the opening set, dragged the match into a decider and made her opponent earn the important points; local coverage called it a positive week and singled out her ability to reset after a poor start. In Cali she made another final, led early, then watched Catalina Delmás turn the contest around — competitive over three sets again, but unable to hold the momentum once the direction of play changed.

The best of it came in August at the South American under-16 team championship. Lares won the opening singles rubber in the final and then came back out to win the decisive doubles, which tells you rather more about her temperament than a stack of routine junior victories would. She has played at this Barranquilla complex before, in a junior event, and she is refreshingly blunt about it: "It didn't go very well, but that tournament helped me prepare for bigger tournaments, where I competed better."

Her stated ambition for the week is modest and, one suspects, deliberately so. "I hope to give my best, fight every point… playing older, more experienced women helps me gain experience," she said. That framing lifts a lot of weight off a home wildcard. The unanswered question is not her attitude but her calibration: everything she has built lately was built against a junior ball, and this match asks her to adjust to professional pace inside the first three games.

Jacquemot's Summer of No Solutions — and One Stubborn Comeback

Jacquemot's season has been a long argument with herself. Monterrey, Cincinnati, Warsaw and the US Open all ended early, and the pattern was not simply the quality of the draw. Against Rebecca Šramková in Cincinnati she stayed close deep into the first set, lost the closing stretch and then faded. Against Anna Bondar her second serve grew steadily more inviting while her return game generated too little pressure to change anything.

New York was the low point. She broke serve immediately against Marie Bouzkova, failed to consolidate, and then, in L'Équipe's words, had "no solution" — an unreliable serve, accumulating errors and no way to hold rally quality once Bouzkova settled into the exchanges. That is a specific kind of bad week: not outplayed by a superior force, but unable to convert her own competitive phases into control.

Then came Barranquilla qualifying, and something firmer. Jacquemot beat Ekaterina Ovcharenko across nearly three hours, took the first set, lost a tight second-set tie-break after being close to finishing, and answered by winning the first five games of the decider. Her serve gave her free points and a pile of double faults in roughly equal measure. It was the best evidence in weeks that she can still refuse to fold — and it also cost her almost three hours of legs on a hot week.

Serve-Plus-Forehand Against a Girl Who Won't Go Away

Jacquemot has described her own game clearly enough: the serve and the forehand are her weapons, and her project this season has been to step into the court and become "the boss" of rallies rather than waiting for mistakes. That plan fits this match almost too neatly. If she lands first serves and hits the first forehand on her terms, the gap in weight of shot should show up quickly in where the two players are standing on the court.

The flaw in the plan is the plan's own foundation. When Jacquemot's first serve deserts her, the second delivery invites aggressive returns, and she begins rallies from a defensive position — exactly the sequence that unravelled her summer. Lares, for her part, has no business trying to match professional acceleration. Her route is depth on return, an extra ball in every exchange, variation in height and rhythm, and steady pressure on that second serve, because a plain junior-tempo rally will simply let Jacquemot walk forward.

The circumstances are split neatly down the middle. Lares is fresh, with no injuries reported and no prior-round mileage, but no competitive match on these courts this week. Jacquemot has the acclimatization and none of the freshness, on a day forecast to be hot with a risk of thunderstorms — heat that rewards young legs, delays that could either restore her or break whatever rhythm exists. There is no head-to-head between them and no rivalry to lean on, so everything rests on current circumstances. Her coaching situation is unclear in current reporting, which matters only because tactical clarity has been a recurring theme around her all season.

So the match turns on two things. Whether Jacquemot's opening service games are clean enough to let her play forward, and whether Lares can stay close long enough for the crowd — national support, free public access, a vocal show court — to become an actual factor rather than pleasant background noise. Both women have recently lost matches they were leading; Lares in the Cali final, Jacquemot against Ovcharenko before she rescued it. Neither closing record inspires much confidence, and that is precisely why this one may run longer than the ranking gap suggests.