Even before the elimination, Thursday evening, of the last Frenchman in the running at Roland-Garros, Arthur Rinerknech by Taylor Fritz, the time was already in the balance sheet for a tricolor tennis once again before the precipice and in front of a worrying void. After two laps, the twenty-eight Frenchmen on the track all took the door. The reasons to hope for better days are few even if some talented players like Luca Van Assche or Arthur Fils point their nose.
Consultant at Prime Video and former player (17th in the world and 6 singles titles), Fabrice Santoro was not kind to the world of the little yellow ball in France, calling on national tennis officials to look in the mirror after this umpteenth failure. The problems, according to him, are very structural because French tennis has the means of its ambitions: “On a more global level, we cannot accept the results of French tennis with the means we have, it is not can’t be satisfied with that. We can’t say it’s a generational problem, it’s too easy, it’s a bit like hiding the dust under the rug. I think there were obvious mistakes, which should be recognized first. »
While the walls of the FFT are likely to shake in the coming days, Santoro opens the parenthesis of his personal case and regrets, for example, that the governing bodies have never called on his services: “It’s also a shame sometimes, and here I am going to talk about myself, I spent quite a few years on the circuit, and since I stopped my career, I have been contacted by four foreign federations and I have never received a phone call of the French Tennis Federation. This does not mean that I would have saved French tennis, but I think that at my small level, with my experience, I could have helped one or two players. »
But beyond the fate of his person, Santoro sees wider. He takes advantage of his exposure to tackle the powerful and rich French Tennis Federation which benefits from colossal receipts with the Roland-Garros tournament. A comfortable situation which installs, perhaps, the top of the pyramid of the small yellow ball in ease. “At the end, I’m not the victim since I do lots of other things and life is good, it’s not the federation employees who are well settled either, it’s the young people, these are the young players to whom I could have given some advice. I could have allowed them to avoid some mistakes that I unfortunately made during my career. This is a bit of how I look at French tennis, and unfortunately it is the young budding champions who are the victims. »
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