Tennis French Open:  Yesterday around the Bois de Boulogne there was only one story. It may be a long one, or it could end early. Ideally, the story will run for at least this week, and maybe at the end of it all we will even have a heroine. Comeback tales, there's always a feel-good factor around them.

In 2003, and after serious injury to her feet, Martina Hingis told French newspaper L'Equipe she would be taking an indefinite break from the game. She then fell out of the rankings in September of that year, and intermittently articles emerged of litigation against shoe manufacturers and surgical procedures.

The Hingis career was on ice and, as much as the injury, opinions varied as to whether the power game the Williams sisters had taken up a notch had abetted her shuffle from off the stage.

Yesterday Hingis played through a sleepy match against American Lisa Raymond to win 6-2, 6-2 to keep her hopes alive of winning the only Grand Slam never in her possession. The first flush of her return has passed, and now Hingis is seeking the win that will globally mark her return.

In the official Roland Garros magazine, a four-page spread on the player, who returned last in November, is headlined "Partir Revenir", literally "To leave, to comeback". The lasting image of Hingis at Roland Garros is of her coming to within three points of the title in 1999, before dramatically collapsing and losing to Steffi Graf in three sets.

But the Swiss player, now 25, has won the other three Grand Slams, including three Australian Open titles. Her form this year has also been encouraging enough for the organisers to install her as the 12th seed, just one below Venus Williams.

But whether she achieves a second glory and again soar as high as she once did remains unanswered. George Foreman did it in the ring against Michael Moorer in 1994, so did Michael Jordan on the basketball court in 2001. Bjorn Borg couldn't do it in 1991 in Monte Carlo, and neither could Mark Spitz nor Diego Maradona.

Hingis has already won this year and reached the quarter-final or better in eight other competitions. Importantly, she has, from beginning the year ranked 349th in the world, also beaten two players in the top five.

Yesterday's win was her first on Centre Court in five years. It was a comfortable beginning, but if reports at the weekend are true that Hingis said the French crowd are slow to forgive and slow to forget, then she hasn't learned much in her three-year hiatus.

"I don't think I ever said that, that they were slow to forgive. I really don't know who put those words in my mouth," she said.

The Sunday Times, actually. But Hingis is also confident her game has moved on from where it was when she stopped playing.

"Today I would probably beat the Martina back then," she said. "But who knows? Some of the things I was doing back then I don't have. But I have weapons. It's probably the brains and everything. Experience, more mature."

As ever, though, the calculating side of the personality also emerged. Regardless of what stories the media wish to write, Hingis has tried to remove the emotional cargo in her journey back.

"Everyone expects me to say it's overwhelming to be back here," she added. "You play your matches, try to be focused. You do your things you got to do in that moment, that day. Today I felt confident. That's the way I feel. I never make a big deal of anything anyway. That's my mentality. That's how I am."

Justin Henin-Hardenne, this year's fifth seed, will have known what Hingis was talking about. The Belgian, who has won here twice and is the defending champion, having beaten Mary Pierce 6-1, 6-1 in one of the most one-sided finals in the modern era, knows all about illness, and yesterday was as equally efficient.

Facing Estonia's Maret Ani, ranked 70th in the world, Henin-Hardenne wasted little time, taking the first set 6-3 before a 6-0 second set wrapped up the match.

The shock of the day took place on an outside court where Japan's Akiko Morigami, childishly referred to in the press bar as the player who is made out of paper, dumped the third-seeded Russian Nadia Petrova 6-4, 6-4.

Given Petrova came into Paris with her highest seeding at a Grand Slam, compared to Morigami's world rank of 69th, she was arguably one of the most in-form players in the competition.