Gilles Simon on the retirement of Gaël Monfils: “very sad”

Two months after his appointment as director of high performance at the French Tennis Federation, Gilles Simon spoke to the media for the first time on Tuesday. The setting was the national training centre in Paris. The former world No 6, retired from the tour at the end of 2022, spoke above all about Gaël Monfils: his longtime friend hung up his racquet in early October, and the wound is still raw. “I am obviously very sad. […] I am just sad for my mate in particular, but also for the athlete, the player, who cannot finish the way he would have wanted to,” he told L’Équipe.

The farewell that never happened

Monfils meant to call it a day at the Rolex Paris Masters in early November. In early October his name came off the anti-doping lists and the retirement became official a month before schedule. “I would have liked him to have the strength to go, but it was really very complicated for him and, in any case, we do not judge,” Simon said. On his Twitch channel on Monday evening, Monfils said again that his separation from Elina Svitolina had hurt him “very much as a human”; he had already broken his silence on the subject last week. “I wanted him to play, so I did not reach my own goal,” he told RMC Sport, which summed up the mood: “everyone wanted to see him one last time”.

A generation stops with him

Simon, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Richard Gasquet: Monfils was the last of them still on tour. “We all stopped quite late in the end, around 38. Gaël had this wish to play until 40, it mattered a lot to him,” Simon said. Monfils got there by playing the US Open this season, beaten in the second round by the American Learner Tien, his best Grand Slam result of the year. “Our generation will stop with him, but there are plenty of good reasons to be pleased. […] French tennis will be fine.”

One appointment remains: the ceremony on Tuesday 3 November, alongside the evening session of the Rolex Paris Masters at the Plénitude Arena in Nanterre. Monfils announced it himself, to “say goodbye and thank you to the French public”. “There is not really a place where he left people indifferent […] and so, inevitably, he will be missed,” Simon said. On 3 November, in Nanterre, the crowd will have one last chance to tell him so.