Vacherot withdraws from Roland-Garros with a foot injury he had been signalling all week, Tabilo advances
Alejandro Tabilo benefited from the forfeit of Valentin Vacherot on Thursday afternoon.
Valentin Vacherot, Roland-Garros 2026 | © JB Autissier / PsNewz
Valentin Vacherot, the 16th seed and the first Monégasque man to be seeded at a Grand Slam, withdrew from Roland-Garros on Thursday midday, with a left-foot injury, handing Chile’s Alejandro Tabilo a walkover into the third round. In hindsight, the warning had been there in his own words for days.
Vacherot had won his first-round match on Tuesday, beating French qualifier Thomas Faurel 6-3, 6-4, 3-6, 7-6, but called for the trainer during the contest and finished it close to tears. His press conference afterwards, and the one he gave before the tournament began, now read like a sequence of signals pointing to exactly this outcome.
“It’s not perfect, but not awful,” he said after the Faurel match. “Just got to take care of it.” He described his own injury history in terms that suggested he knew the difference between a niggle and a problem: “The thing is when I am actually injured, it is quite a big one. Very rarely do I have a small pain or inconvenience that goes after a week.”
Cautious during the clay season
The foot, he had explained earlier in the week, was not new. “It was at the end of Madrid. I felt somewhat uncomfortable, and it happens often, and then it becomes a bit more uncomfortable than it was before,” he said in his pre-tournament press conference on Friday.
“So I was cautious in deciding not playing in Rome and Hamburg.” He had already skipped two events to protect it, and laid out a philosophy that all but pre-wrote Thursday’s decision: “Now that I know how to handle injuries, I’m not willing to take any risk.”
Asked about the emotion that had overtaken him at the end of the Faurel match, Vacherot gave an answer that has aged into an explanation. “My emotions had nothing to do with stress,” he said. “I was more moved that I had won that game. I’m very proud for reasons my team know about.”
Blockx, then Vacherot
Tabilo, the world No. 36, advances to the third round, where he will face the winner of the all-debutant meeting between French teenager Moïse Kouamé and Paraguay’s Adolfo Daniel Vallejo. His potential reward is a fourth-round meeting with Félix Auger-Aliassime.
Vacherot is the second man to leave this section of the draw without completing a second-round match. Belgium’s Alexander Blockx, the 21-year-old who reached the Madrid semi-finals last month and had been one of the breakout players of the clay season, withdrew on Tuesday after spraining his ankle in a freak practice accident – he heard a snap, he said, while twisting it on a folded court cover behind a practice court. His exit handed Australian eighth seed Alex de Minaur a walkover into the third round.
