No one has made professional tennis look more like play than Gael Monfils. The Parisian is one of the great athletes the sport has seen, James Blake called him the fastest man on tour, and he has spent two decades turning defence into theatre with dives, jump smashes and winners struck from places nobody else can reach. He rose to a career-high No. 6 in November 2016 and made two Grand Slam semi-finals, Roland Garros in 2008 and the US Open eight years later.
The last act may be the best loved. In January 2025 he won Auckland at 38 years and 132 days, taking the oldest ATP Tour champion record from Roger Federer and lifting the latest of his 13 career titles, twenty years after the first. Married to Elina Svitolina since 2021, with a daughter born the following year, he has announced that 2026 is his farewell season, saying 40 felt like the right time to stop.
Seven. That is how many tour-level finals Alejandro Davidovich Fokina and Zizou Bergs had lost between them without ever winning one. On the same weekend before Wimbledon, both finally broke through: Davidovich Fokina in Mallorca, Bergs in Eastbourne, each a first tour title of his career.
Match tale