Tennis/ French Open: Last year Anastasia Myskina made French Open history when she beat Elena Dementieva to become the first Russian to win at Roland Garros. Yesterday the forlorn 23-year-old entered the record books again and became the only defending champion in the tournament's history to tumble at the first hurdle.

Myskina's soporific defeat to rank outsider Sanchez Lorenzo is also only the third time in the Open era that a defending champion has lost in the first round of a Grand Slam event. In 1994 Steffi Graf lost to American Lori McNeil at Wimbledon and at the Australian Open in 2003, Jennifer Capriati was beaten by Germany's Marlene Weingaertner.

Afterwards Myskina had the look and the disposition of a player who simply didn't care. Occasionally flippant at the after-match press conference, Myskina's troubles have been more off court than between the lines. Earlier in the week she announced that her mother was seriously ill and asked that her personal life be kept out of her tennis.

The young Russian had been going through a slump in recent months and a variety of reasons were put into the public domain to try to explain it, the more exaggerated romantic tales finally forcing her explanation.

The defending champion played an entirely unanimated match as if the tennis was far from her thinking and Lorenzo, with one previous WTA title to her name, took full advantage of the garbage that was presented. That amounted to a veritable rubbish tip of 69 unforced Myskina errors and only 16 winners. In the third set alone Myskina, almost impossibly, hit only three outright winners on the road to her 6-4, 4-6, 6-0 defeat.

In fact what Lorenzo achieved was quite a difficult thing to do and required an almost total collapse from Myskina. The Spaniard hit almost 50 unforced errors in the match and a total of only nine winners. In the final set, which Lorenzo won 6-0, she was judged to have hit only one outright winner, a volley!

"Right now it's a tough time," said Myskina. "Maybe I'm not really ready to win right now. I think maybe I can lose to anybody because in the past couple of weeks I can't even pass the first shot. So no matter who is playing me, the girl's just winning. I can't say she did anything really special to beat me today. A lot of unforced errors from my side, not good serve. That's why I lose."

Carrying a shoulder injury coming into the tournament, Myskina made it perfectly clear that her body was an innocent party to yesterday's messy affair. There was no ambivalence.

"You know if my shoulder was 100 per cent I still would not win this match," she declared. "My game right now is just perfect to be off the court. Right now I step on the court, I hit the ball but the ball goes off court."

Her mother's illness was never far from the surface, the real reason behind her historic defeat.

Asked whether it was difficult to concentrate given her anxieties, she answered: "Well just put yourself on myself. You know how you would feel."

World number one Lindsay Davenport was a slow starter before taking an hour and three quarters to beat Slovenia's Katerina Srebotnik 3-6, 6-2, 6-2 while last year's beaten finalist Dementieva, who did not come into the competition with a great streak of form, also advanced with some ease 6-3, 6-4 against the Czech Republic's Barbora Strycova.

"I feel like my game is more solid now," said the young Russian, whose serve catastrophically deserted her in last year's final.

"I remember last year I had a very tough start, I was very nervous in the first two, three rounds, so I'm happy to play solid."

Kim Clijsters had one of the easiest of first-round passages against American qualifier Meilen Tu, winning 6-1, 6-0.

Clijsters, despite being number one in the world in 2003, has not played in a grand slam event in more than a year because of a career-threatening injury to her left wrist. She made a return in March of this year only to injure a knee in Berlin earlier this month.