A perfect moment, just the body and this emotions made the fifth set messy: Monfils’s farewell in his own words
For Gaël Monfils, his final Roland-Garros match against Hugo Gaston was almost perfect, save for the fifth set. Lost 6-0, it was a moment where body and emotions gave way, an experience Monfils now cherishes as part of his unique farewell.
Gaël Monfils, Roland-Garros 2026 | © Julien Nouet / Tennis Majors
There was one flaw in the evening, and Gaël Monfils could name it with precision. The fifth set. The 6-0. The moment his body and his emotions gave way at the same point. Everything before that had been more than he had let himself imagine for his first match of his last appearance in Roland-Garros.
“Even in my craziest dreams, I could never have imagined that it would be like this. It was really exceptional. I leave here fulfilled.”
He had walked onto Court Philippe-Chatrier on Monday night carrying the weight of a farewell he had been waiting for since announcing his retirement in October. Three hours and 22 minutes later, he walked off having lost to Hugo Gaston 6-2, 6-3, 3-6, 2-6, 6-0, a scoreline that reads like two different matches stitched together, because that is what it was.
Gaston-Monfils, A Match of Two Halves
The first match belonged to Gaston. Monfils was on the court but not in his body. “When I went out on the court, I was not feeling as good as I felt five minutes before. It’s as if you want to do things too well. It’s not really in the head. It was more the way my body was feeling, the way I was moving around on the court.”
Two sets down, the crowd quieter than it wanted to be, Monfils found something in the third. The strikes cleaned up. The patience returned. He took the third 6-3 and the fourth 6-2, and Chatrier began to believe what it had come to see. At the end of the third set the stadium was on its feet, chanting his name. The figure across the net heard it the same way. “It was quite a strange feeling when everyone was shouting Gaël, Gaël. I wanted to shout with them.”
Gaston’s Own Battle and Monfils’ Acceptance
What the crowd did not know was that Gaston, too, was unravelling. He had come into the match carrying a lingering virus, his heart rate spiking through the long rallies and refusing to come back down. Between the third and the fifth he called for the tournament doctors and took medication to steady himself. By the time he was steady, he was cramping.
The fifth set, then, was not the story of a clever opponent finishing off a tired veteran. It was the story of two compromised bodies asked the same question, and the younger one finding the answer. “Physically, it was tougher. Hugo was playing well and he had the upper hand. He varied a lot in the fifth, with drop shots. I was struggling to push forward.”
Game by game, the fifth set unspooled. 5-0. Monfils to serve to stay in the match. Three match points away from the end of his Roland-Garros career. For two points he held himself together. Then he didn’t. “I was still in it until Love-30. After Love-30, it’s a bit of a mess. There are a lot of emotions. We try to block them, but a lot of emotions.”
It was magnificent. Honestly – magnificent, magical. I couldn’t have dreamt of better. I leave here fulfilled.
The body, also, had decided. What came out of him next was not the lament of a player describing a loss. It was something stranger and more settled. “It’s nice because these are new sensations, a sensation you can only know at the end of the journey. So I knew it, and I’m happy.” The 6-0, when it came, was not a defeat so much as the part of the experience he had not yet lived.
Across the net was a friend. Gaston had said after the match he felt joy and sadness in equal measure. Monfils heard it the way it was meant. “I know Hugo likes me a lot. We have a good laugh together. Recently we trained a lot together. So of course it was a little bit harder for him to put me to rest like that. I was happy for him. Honestly, to lose against somebody you like is really great.”
It was Monfils’s seventeenth five-set match at Roland-Garros, the most by any French player in the tournament’s history. He has lost his last one. He left the court to a standing ovation that did not end when he disappeared into the tunnel, and arrived in the press conference still trying to block the feelings he had spent the evening refusing. “I really try to block them. I feel I will have a tough night tonight.”
Before going to sleep, he had these last words: “It was magnificent. Honestly – magnificent, magical. I couldn’t have dreamt of better. I leave here fulfilled.” The fifth is just a drop in the ocean of memories.
