Tennis fans have been waiting for it since 2000 and Mary Pierce’s victory in the French Open final. It will not be this year that they will see a Frenchwoman or a Frenchman win the Parisian tennis tournament. Among men, the last victory, that of Yannick Noah against Mats Wilander, dates back forty years, in 1983.
The defeat of Arthur Rinderknech, on the evening of Thursday June 1, marked the end of the French hopes for 2023, when 28 French players were involved in the tournament. The last Frenchman to qualify for the round of 16 was Hugo Gaston in 2020; that year, the Franco-Belgian Fiona Ferro had reached the quarter-finals before being taken out by the American Sofia Kenin.
This graph brings together the number of tricolor representatives qualified in the second week, that is to say those who passed the third round and reached at least the round of 16.
Among men, between the beginning of the 2000s and 2017, we frequently found one or more French players in the round of 16, or even better. There were even five in the second week in 2008 and 2015.
Overall, for fifty years, the level of the French in tennis rarely takes them beyond the round of 16, or even the quarters. Among women, this ceiling is more marked after the eighth, even if they have generally gone further than men over the past ten years.