The Portrait of Rising French Tennis Star Arthur Fils: A Roland-Garros Sensation

The portrait

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Roland-Garros 2024dossierA few days before the Roland-Garros tournament, meeting in Chile with the young player, originally from Essonne, a rising sensation in French tennis.

Can we travel the world 250 days a year, change time zones like shirts and be immune to the noise of a planet that is cracking from every angle? Perhaps it is enough to belong to the elite of world tennis; a few hundred professional players who travel fifteen to twenty weeks a year, with supreme indifference to the surrounding scenery. “We are constantly moving from one country to another. We don’t live in airports, but almost. I follow the news from afar. The war in Ukraine? We never talk about it with the Russians at tournaments. We are rather wondering about their presence at the Paris Olympics,” Arthur Fils bluntly unpacks. The new sensation of French tennis, 20 years old in a month, is preparing for Roland-Garros, after an early elimination in Rome.

On this southern summer Sunday at the tournament in Santiago (Chile), he sacrificed to the media day imposed by the ATP, the body that governs the circuit, at the San Carlos d’Apoquindo sports complex, in a rural barrio at the east of the city, a stone’s throw from the Andes mountain range and the orange skies of ghostly late afternoons. Timed interview and photo shoot in the strictly allocated space, like the waiting room of an abandoned station. The native of Courcouronnes (Essonne) is not here to discover the splendors of the Chilean capital, nor to waste his time with scribblers, he has a business

2024-05-16 13:01:06
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