PARIS (AP) — Get ready for the French Open before play begins Sunday with a guide that tells you everything you need to know about how to watch the second Grand Slam tennis tournament of 2025 on TV, what the betting odds are, what the schedule is, who the defending champions are and more:
Play begins Sunday at 11 a.m. local time, which is 5 a.m. ET.
— In the U.S.: TNT, TruTV, HBO Max — in the first year of a 10-year, $650 million deal.
— Other countries are listed here.
This is the first time the event will be held since the man known as the King of Clay, Rafael Nadal, retired last season. He collected 14 championships at the French Open, more than any man or woman won any Grand Slam title. Nadal will be honored during a ceremony on Sunday at Court Philippe-Chatrier.
Iga Swiatek of Poland and Carlos Alcaraz of Spain. Swiatek defeated Jasmine Paolini 6-2, 6-1 in 1 hour, 8 minutes for a third consecutive championship at Roland-Garros. Alcaraz beat Alexander Zverev 6-3, 2-6, 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 in 4 hours, 19 minutes, to become, at 21, the youngest man to win Grand Slam titles on all three surfaces — clay, grass and hard courts.
Aryna Sabalenka is the top-seeded woman, and Jannik Sinner is the top-seeded man. They are the players who are ranked No. 1, and the tournament seedings follow the WTA and ATP rankings.
Sabalenka and Alcaraz are listed as the money-line favorites to win the singles trophies, according to BetMGM Sportsbook. Sabalenka is at +275, and Alcaraz is at +105, ahead of Sinner (+200). Swiatek, winner of four of the past five women’s titles in Paris, is the second women's choice at +350.
Both, as you can read about in this AP story from 2019. English speakers tend to use “French Open,” although the French tennis federation doesn't call it that. The French — and much of the rest of the world — go with “Roland-Garros,” which is the facility that hosts the tournament and is named after a World War I fighter pilot.
The French Open is played outdoors on red clay courts at Roland-Garros on the southwest outskirts of Paris. Women play best-of-three-set matches with a first-to-10 tiebreaker at 6-all in the third; men play best-of-five with a tiebreaker at 6-all in the fifth. There are separate day and night sessions most days. The event lasts 15 days. There is a retractable roof on the main stadium, Court Philippe-Chatrier.
— Sunday through Tuesday: First Round (Women and Men)
— Wednesday-Thursday: Second Round (Women and Men)
— May 30-31: Third Round (Women and Men)
— June 1-2: Fourth Round (Women and Men)
— June 3-4: Quarterfinals (Women and Men)
— June 5: Women’s Semifinals
— June 6: Men’s Semifinals
— June 7: Women’s Final
— June 8: Men’s Final
Let’s see if you know as much as you think you do about Roland-Garros. The Associated Press has put together a quiz to test your knowledge — the faster you answer, the more points you get. Try to top the leaderboard.
— The certainty Rafael Nadal and Iga Swiatek brought to Paris is missing now
— A look at some of the top women and top men heading into the French Open
— Novak Djokovic, Coco Gauff and other players ask the Grand Slam events for more money
— A group of tennis players filed a class-action lawsuit against the folks who run the sport
— No. 1 Jannik Sinner is back on tour after serving a 3-month doping ban
Total player compensation at the French Open is 56.352 million euros (about $62.5 million), which includes per diems and money paid to former players taking part in exhibitions. The two singles champions each will receive 2.55 million euros (about $2.8 million).
AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
FILE - Poland's Iga Swiatek holds the trophy after winning the women's final of the French Open tennis tournament against Italy's Jasmine Paolini at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris, France, June 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)
FILE - Winner Spain's Carlos Alcaraz celebrates with the trophy as he won the men's final match of the French Open tennis tournament against Germany's Alexander Zverev at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris, June 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard, File)
FILE - View of center court Philippe Chatrier during the semifinal match of the French Open tennis tournament between Poland's Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff of the U.S. at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris, June 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
