This year’s French Open, on both the men’s and women’s side, has been complete and utter chaos. Carlos Alcaraz? Missed the tournament with a wrist injury. Defending champion Coco Gauff? Bounced in the third round. World No. 1s Jannik Sinner and Aryna Sabalenka? Both suffered such complete and total meltdowns that it seemed to shake their belief in tennis itself.

But all that upheaval also created opportunity. And one particular player has come out of nowhere to seize it: 24-year-old Polish qualifier Maja Chwalińska, who takes on No. 8 seed Mirra Andreeva in the women’s singles final on Saturday morning. Chwalińska has already authored a Cinderella story for the ages just to get to this point. Pull off one more upset, and she’ll have etched her name permanently into tennis history.

Who is Maja Chwalińska? How a 24-year-old qualifier shocked Roland Garros

To call Chwalińska an underdog would be an insult to underdogs. Ranked No. 114 world entering the tournament, she’d only managed to qualify for two majors in her entire career to date: Wimbledon in 2022 (lost in the second round) and last year’s Australian Open (lost in the first round). She’d also only won two WTA Tour-level matches on clay in her entire career. We’re talking about a player who had to buy clothing from the Roland Garros pro shop prior to competition because she doesn’t have any sponsors to provide them for her.

But once she stepped foot on the court in Paris, something clicked. Chwalińska stormed through qualifiers in the middle of May to earn her place in the women’s draw, and from there, she just kept on stacking wins. An upset of 2024 Olympic gold medalist Qinwen Zheng came first. Then it was No. 23 seed Elise Mertens. She finally faced a third set against former French Open semifinalist Maria Sakkari, only to breeze through it 6-2. By the time she toppled hometown favorite Diane Parry to reach her first-ever Grand Slam quarterfinal, the bracket had been fully blown to smithereens — and it became clear that she was playing well enough to win the whole thing.

The road got a bit tougher from there, forced into first-set tiebreaks against both No. 22 seed Anna Kalinskaya and No. 25 seed Diana Shnaider, but in both cases she dug deep in eventual straight-set wins. And now she’s on the verge of completing one of the most miraculous runs in tennis history.

Has a qualifier ever won a Grand Slam singles title in tennis?

Just how unlikely is this run, historically speaking? With her win over Kalinskaya, Chwalińska became only the sixth female qualifier in the Open era (since 1969) to reach the semifinals of a Grand Slam. Now she’s trying to join a very exclusive club: If she beats Andreeva in the final, she’ll join Emma Raducanu as the only qualifiers — man or woman — to win a Slam.

Raducanu did so at the 2021 U.S. Open, capturing hearts and minds while storming through the field without dropping a single set. But she was also just 20 years old at the time, and had just a month or so prior gotten all the way to the fourth round at Wimbledon. Chwalińska, on the other hand, is already 24 — practically ancient in tennis years. And she’d shown absolutely no signs whatsoever that she was capable of a run like this.

Then again, that’s the magic of clay, and of this tournament in particular. The surface and the weather at Roland Garros can break even the biggest names in the sport. But where stars like Sabalenka have crumbled, Chwalińska has refused to blink.

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