Drugs were bound to come up. And they did within minutes of Jennifer Capriati beating Japan's Ai Sugiyama 6-0 6-2 yesterday to reach her first grand slam semi-final since 1991.

At the subsequent press conference she was asked what she would have thought a year ago had someone suggested that she could win such a crucial match so easily. To be more specific, she was asked whether she would have thought that they might be "smoking something".

Capriati smiled and hit an affable "no comment" back to reporters, her face a far cry from the police mug-shot broadcast around the world after her arrest for marijuana possession in 1994.

Her former problems are well documented. She was a spectacularly good teenager, reaching the last four of the French Open in 1990 when she was only 14, the youngest ever grand slam semi-finalist.

Two years later she defeated Steffi Graf to win the Olympic gold in Barcelona, but by the following year her career had lurched off the rails, leaving blood on the tracks.

Two much-publicised arrests and continuous problems with her father, Stefano, saw her private life in turmoil, and various attempts to reconstruct her career ended in failure and self-remorse.

But now, for the first time since those heady, carefree days of 1991, when she also reached the US Open semi-final, Capriati has done it again, and tomorrow will play Lindsay Davenport for a place in Saturday's final, Davenport having thumped the French woman, Julie Halard-Decugis, 61 6-2.

In itself, this is reason enough for Capriati to celebrate. Much more importantly, she appears to have come to terms with herself.

"I've stopped thinking what the world was going to think of me, and that's a big step," she said after sweeping Sugiyama aside. "Even if I lose a match I am not going to be destroyed or devastated. Because I felt negative about myself, I was convinced that the world felt negative about me. With help, I changed that and made it positive."

The other big help has been Harold Soloman, Jim Courier's former coach. "I was desperately looking for somebody and I spoke to Harold just before the Lipton Championships last year. Right off the bat, we hit it off. He said he really believed I could go all the way, even number one maybe. Right there and then, it lifted my confidence."

Capriati, who will be 24 in March, reached the last 16 at the French and US Opens last year, won titles in Strasbourg and Quebec, her first for six years, and finished the year just outside the top 20.

A strained abdominal muscle, sustained before she played Sugiyama, raised brief fears and she needed a seven-minute injury break in the first set to get it re-strapped off court, but her immensely powerful hitting, a feature of her teenage days, was altogether too much for the Japanese woman.

Andre Agassi also falls into the realms of a comeback kid. His startling metamorphosis from flamboyant profligate to supremely professional hermetically focused champion has rarely been more tellingly and tangibly demonstrated over the past extraordinary nine months than during his 6-4 6-4 6-2 quarter-final victory over Hicham Arazi.

If Agassi, out of the corner of his mind's eye, caught a little bit of his former self in Arazi's cavalier attitude and approach, then he erased the image from his thoughts with the same intensity that he crushed the Moroccan.

And so, for the 29th time, Agassi and Pete Sampras, the two finest players of the past decade, will meet again.

Sampras yesterday defeated Chris Woodruff, the fourth-round conqueror of Tim Henman, 7-5 6-3 6-3. In all likelihood his semi-final against Agassi tomorrow will decide who will be crowned champion on Sunday.

"When Pete's in the draw, whether it's one side or the other, my general take on it is that I have to beat him to win the title," Agassi said. "It's better for the game if we happen to meet in the finals, because of the interest it draws, but it doesn't matter a whole lot."

Agassi, who trails 17-11 in their head-to-heads, acknowledged that Sampras is "the greatest big-match player that has ever played the game", but such has been his form, and Sampras' occasional unease here, that Agassi may well be capable of repeating the victory of their only other meeting in this tournament, when he defeated Sampras in the 1995 final.

"Andre has been a inspiration," said Capriati of her fellow American.

"She has certainly shown a lot of perseverance and strength of character," Agassi replied. "The results don't come right away, so when they do start happening it's a pleasure to be out there, and it's a pleasure to watch her."