French tennis fiasco at Roland-Garros: Santoro targets "well-established employees of the Federation"

Even before the elimination, Thursday night, of the last Frenchman in contention at Roland-Garros, Arthur Rinerknech by Taylor Fritz, the time was already to take stock of a French tennis once again in front of the precipice and in front of a worrying void. After two laps the twenty-eight Frenchmen on track all took the door. The reasons to hope for better days are few even if some talented players like Luca Van Assche or Arthur Son point their nose.

To discover

• Roland Garros Men's Singles
• Roland Garros Women's Singles

Consultant at Prime Video and former player (17th in the world and 6 singles titles), Fabrice Santoro has not been kind to the world of the little yellow ball in France, calling on national tennis officials to look at themselves in the mirror after this umpteenth failure. The problems, according to him, its structural good because French tennis has the means of its ambitions: "On a more global level, we can not accept the results of French tennis with the means we have, it is not possible to be satisfied with that. We can't say it's a generational problem, it's too easy, it's kind of hiding the dust under the carpet. I think there were obvious mistakes, which should be acknowledged first.

I have been contacted by four foreign federations and I have never received a phone call from the French Tennis Federation.

Fabrice Santoro

Read alsoRoland-Garros 2023: the program, the favorites in the running, the anecdote and the figure of Friday, June 2

While the walls of the FFT may shake in the coming days, Santoro opens the parenthesis of his personal case and regrets, for example, that the governing bodies have never called on his services: "It's also a shame sometimes, and here I'll talk about myself, I spent a lot of years on the circuit, and since I stopped my career, I have been contacted by four foreign federations and I have never received a phone call from the French Tennis Federation. That doesn't mean I would have saved French tennis, but I think that at my small level, with my experience, I could have helped one or two players.

" READ ALSO Roland-Garros: Fritz extinguishes the boiling public of Suzanne-Lenglen and the room

The victims are not the employees of the federation who are well established.

Fabrice Santoro

But beyond the fate of his person, Santoro sees wider. He takes advantage of his exposure to tackle the powerful and rich French Tennis Federation which benefits from colossal revenues with the Roland-Garros tournament. A comfortable situation that installs, perhaps, the top of the pyramid of the little yellow ball in ease. "At the finish, it's not me the victim because I do a lot of other things and life is good, it's not the employees of the federation who are well established, it's the young players, it's the young players to whom I could have given some advice. I could have allowed them to avoid some mistakes that I have unfortunately made during my career. That's a little bit the way I look at French tennis, and unfortunately it's the young budding champions who are victims.