“It was a magical, marvelous and extraordinary adventure. It will end at the end of the year”. It is with these words that the French tennis player on Saturday Gilles Simon announced the end of his sports career this Saturday on his Twitter account. At 37, he claims to have “no sadness, no regrets, just the desire to put everything I have left into each match”.
Gilles Simon, one of the most successful Frenchmen, is the second player of “the golden generation” of French tennis to announce the end of his career, after Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in April. With Richard Gasquet and Gaël Monfils, they were together nicknamed the “four musketeers”.
The Frenchman has won 14 main circuit tournaments in his career, and made two Grand Slam quarter-finals at the Australian Open in 2009 and Wimbledon in 2015.
The Niçois, currently 158th in the ATP rankings, had his best ranking with 6th place in the world on January 5, 2009, after a prosperous 2008 season with three titles (Bucharest, Indianapolis and Casablanca) and above all a semi-final at the Masters 1000 in Toronto. (hard) and a final at the Masters 1000 in Madrid (hard) with a victory against Rafael Nadal in the semis. During this 2008 season during which he also beat Novak Djokovic, he qualified for the Masters in Shanghai, offering himself the scalp of Roger Federer before yielding in the semi-final against Djokovic, not without having pushed the Serb in its entrenchments (4-6, 6-3, 7-5).