Day 3 Results: Almagro out; Other Near-Upsets

Day three at Roland Garros featured the first matches for Rafael Nadal, Kim Clijsters, and several other top seeds both on the men's and women's side. Nadal's match with former Georgia Bulldog John Isner, which was the most highly anticipated match of the day, did not disappoint. Just when it seemed like Nadal, who was up a set and break, was going to run away with the match, Isner heated up. The American won both the second and third sets in tiebreaks, and all of a sudden, the King of Clay was six games from being defeated in the first round. Nadal easily took set four, which meant that he would be playing his first ever five-set match at Roland Garros to get out of the first round. An early break in the fifth set proved to be all the Spainard needed, as he took the fifth and final set 6-4, ending a nearly four-hour epic. The rest of the results are after the jump.


Elsewhere on the men's side, two-time French Open finalist Robin Soderling overcame a heroic effort by young American Ryan Harrison and 8th-seeded Jurgen Melzer cruised past Gregor DiMitrov to advance to the second round. The only seeded players on the men's side to go down was 11th-seeded Nicolas Almagro, who won the first two seeds before losing to 122nd-ranked Lukasz Kubot of Poland.

On the women's side of the draw, 2nd-seeded Kim Clijsters, 4th-seeded Victoria Azarenka, 7th-seeded Maria Sharapova, and 8th-seeded Li Na all advanced rather easily. Meanwhile, former French Open Champion Ana Ivanovic suffered another disappointing early-round defeat at a major, falling to Johanna Larsson of Sweden in three sets. The only other seeded women's player to fall in the first round on Tuesday was Dominika Cibulkova of Slovakia, who fell to American Vania King.

At some points on Tuesday, it seemed possible that two of the top-5 seeds on the men's side were going to be upset in the first round of the French Open. As it turned out, most of the top seeds on both the men's and women's side moved on, restoring some sort of order to the 2011 French Open.