Casper Ruud once again played in the week before Roland Garros, and he explained why he went against the tradition of some players.
A few years ago, Novak Djokovic admitted that he enjoys playing an event leading up to a Grand Slam, which is an interesting claim. Generally, players avoid doing that, opting to simply practice on the courts where they'll play matches the following week because the idea is that they want to get used to playing where they're going to be playing next.
It's a tradition that most top names don't play in the week leading up to a Grand Slam, but still, there are exceptions. Ruud has done it a few times, especially ahead of Roland Garros, and it didn't really hurt him that much.
He's played in two back-to-back finals at the clay-court major, which is a pretty good result. He didn't win either time, but he faced Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in the final, which explains a lot of why it happened.
For most of the weeks that he played before Paris, Ruud finished with a trophy at the Geneva Open. That's what happened this year, as well, as he won it again.
When asked why he played ahead of the Roland Garros, the Norwegian gave a pretty solid response that makes a lot of sense in the context in which he mentioned it.
"You look at all the players in Paris -- what do they do in training? They play matches. So why don't you just come here and play a real match instead of just practice matches?"
Ruud actually got to play two matches on Sunday because his Saturday semi-final was moved because of rain. He spent over three hours in total playing that day, and that's a big workload he might have wanted to avoid.
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