They are eight Blues to play in the American tournament.
Gaël Monfils (28th in the world), Ugo Humbert (42nd), Benoît Paire (53rd), Arthur Rinderknech (57th), Benjamin Bonzi (62nd), Adrian Mannarino (66th), Hugo Gaston (68th), Richard Gasquet (81st) -, even nine if Gilles Simon (139th) comes out of qualifying, will be in the running for men.
Among the women, Alizé Cornet (37th), Caroline Garcia (74th), Clara Burel (75th) and Océane Dodin (93rd) could be joined by Harmony Tan (99th), Diane Parry (100th) and Chloé Paquet (111th) if they come out of qualifications.
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Since Marion Bartoli, finalist in 2011, and Kristina Mladenovic, semi-finalist in 2017, the French have struggled to shine in Indian Wells.
In two previous editions, only Garcia (2019, 2021), Cornet (2021) and Mladenovic (2019) have passed the first round to stop at the next.
Besides the fact that he is the best ranked, Monfils is the one who has usually sailed the best in recent years in the Californian desert, since he is the last to have reached the quarter-finals, in 2016 like Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
And he reached the round of 16 in the two previous editions.
These performances are far from the finals lost by Yannick Noah in 1989 and Guy Forget in 1991, but denote a certain regularity of the 35-year-old Parisian.
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An unknown however: his level of competitiveness, because he was absent from the courts the whole month of February, due, he explained, to “
a small health glitch (probably following my third dose of vaccine)
".
This forced him to forfeit the tournaments in Rotterdam, Doha, Dubai and for the Davis Cup play-off match against Ecuador.