At one point Terence Atmane started serving underarm. And not only that: he started serving right-handed. He’s left-handed…
He was two sets up against Jaume Munar in the first round of the US Open. He had even been a break up in the third. Then his body started refusing to cooperate, one part at a time. First one leg, then the other, and eventually his arm. He was struggling to walk; he would stop, then get going again. On some points, he seemed to be doing little more than getting the ball over the net so he could make it to the end of the game.
In the fifth set, with Munar leading 2-1, he called the physio.
Atmane said he was in pain. The physio examined him and came to a different conclusion: as far as he was concerned, it was cramp.
The distinction might seem tiny. Cramp hurts, especially when you’ve been playing tennis for almost five hours. Under the Grand Slam Rule Book, however, the distinction is anything but tiny.
The rules divide physical problems into categories with the bureaucratic precision of a council office. There are acute medical conditions: illnesses or musculoskeletal injuries that occur suddenly and require immediate attention. Then there are non-acute medical conditions, which develop or worsen during the match but can be treated at a changeover or at the end of a set. And then there are them: the conditions that cannot be treated. And I’m not talking about Jodar’s shoelaces.
Cramp gets special treatment: it can be treated, but only during the time normally available at changeovers or between sets. It does not entitle you to a Medical Time-Out. And if there is any doubt over which box the player’s problem belongs in, the physio decides, if necessary together with the tournament doctor. THE PHYSIO DECIDES, got that…?!
The rulebook closes the matter with four very precise, very efficient words: the decision is final.
We don’t know whether he had cramp or something else. What we do know is that Atmane knew that rule perfectly well.
Which is why he started protesting. He said that precisely because he knew the rule, he would never have called the physio for cramp. What he was feeling, he kept insisting, was pain. At one point he even asked the physio for his name and accreditation. You can understand why: I wouldn’t ask a physio for a diagnosis, at most an opinion. A clinical classification made in a couple of minutes should not have final consequences under the rules.
And yet… for all the boiling over, for all the fact that he was fucking furious, nothing changed: the decision is final.
The rules even spell out what must happen when a player says he has an acute problem and the physio decides instead that it is cramp: the umpire must order him to resume play immediately. If the cramp is so severe that the player cannot make it to the next changeover, there is another solution. The player, kind souls that they are, may voluntarily concede however many points or games are needed to get there and receive treatment.
Tennis is remarkable: it has even legislated for the case of a player who is too unwell to reach the moment at which he is officially allowed to be unwell. He just has to lose faster.
Munar won 7-5 in the fifth, after four hours and 54 minutes. It would be wrong to say Atmane lost because of that decision. He had been in trouble for a long time and Munar had already fought his way back from two sets down: too much happens in a match like that to reduce it to three minutes of treatment he did not get.
It would be wrong, unless you’re Atmane.
That decision still had consequences for Atmane that went well beyond the sporting result.
Playing and losing in the first round of the US Open had earned him $140,000. Had he won that match, he would have moved on to the $190,000 paid in the second round.
Fifty thousand dollars’ difference, plus the ATP points and the chance to stay in the tournament.
Of course, the physio was not deciding which cheque Atmane got to cash. That was not his problem. He simply had to decide whether that pain belonged in category A, B or C under the rules.
Someone will say: “Well, that seems fair enough. He’s in pain, tough luck, he loses money.”
Except there is another story.
A few days before the US Open, Mackenzie McDonald had told the Guardian that he knew “a good handful” of players who were seriously injured at that very moment. And he already knew what they were going to do: they were going to New York.
And they were going to play.
The reason is the same one that was merely incidental in Atmane’s case, except here it is much simpler. The loser in the first round of the 2026 US Open gets $140,000, as we have now learnt.
“They have bills to pay,” McDonald explained. They have to pay for a flat wherever in the world they happen to be, and do you think they don’t have to pay their coach? In their case, certainly the physio too, and more generally the fitness coach. For many players, he said, the Slams are the engine that enables them to make a living: the engine that allows them to make a living from tennis.
This year the US Open increased first-round prize money by 27 per cent, taking it to the highest amount ever paid by a Slam to someone who loses their opening match. Obviously, that is a good thing. For years players have been asking for more of the wealth generated by tournaments to make its way down to the early rounds, because professional tennis has one brutal peculiarity: before you can start earning like a professional, you have to spend like one.
When you don’t play, nothing comes in. At least if you’re somewhere in the middle or lower down.
McDonald knows that from personal experience as well. In 2019, after breaking into the world’s top 60, he suffered a serious hamstring-tendon injury and missed most of the season. He has spoken about finding himself in his flat unable to walk, wondering how he was ever going to start earning money again.
Then there is the other part: your ranking drops. When your ranking drops, the level of tournament you can get into drops with it. And when you come back, you don’t simply pick up where you left off.
That is why $140,000 can radically change the way pain looks when you are a player. A brief aside here about tennis and pain in other sports: yes, Sinner and Musetti have physical problems and “go to pieces” in the sun; yes, Alcaraz has to take a few months off to recover from cramp, and so on.
But no tragedy: you’re not Pogačar risking permanent damage, you’re not a cyclist for whom pain is good news because it means “you’re not dead”. In other words, generally speaking, we’re not talking about anything particularly grave.
Still, if you’re watching and wondering why there are so many bizarrely poor first-round performances, this might give you some idea of why they keep happening.
Here too, incidentally, the Grand Slam Rule Book has anticipated the problem.
A player who has already been admitted to the main draw and withdraws before his first match may, under certain conditions, still receive 50 per cent of the first-round prize money. He has to be on site and declared unfit to play by the tournament doctor. He has to meet the relevant deadlines and must have played at least one tournament in the preceding 21 days, which, in truth, only compounds the problem. But there is clearly a rationale to it.
At the 2026 US Open, that means pocketing $70,000.
If you play: $140,000.
If the doctor certifies that you cannot play: $70,000.
The rules are clearly trying to prevent a seriously injured player from being forced to walk on court purely to collect the money. But at the same time they put a price on not trying: seventy thousand dollars.
I’d play.
And because sporting bureaucracy does not like leaving a problem half-solved, there is another rule immediately afterwards to make sure even I couldn’t just turn up and play. It is called First-Round Performance. If you go on court, you have to produce a professional-level performance. If the referee believes a player has turned up purely to collect the prize money without genuinely being fit to compete, he can fine him up to the full amount of the first-round prize.
Bastards: if I turned up, I’d give it everything!
The system is almost elegant, in its own way.
If you are too badly injured, you can take half the money and withdraw. But if you want all the money, you have to actually play. If you start playing and then something goes wrong physically, you can call the physio. But if the physio decides it is cramp, no Medical Time-Out. And if the cramp means you cannot make it to the changeover, you can voluntarily lose however many points you need to get there.
None of these rules is particularly absurd.
But couldn’t a player take the court injured and then immediately get cramp? Problem solved?
All right, forget unlikely scenarios and back to the serious point: the overall result is still a pretty strange situation.
Atmane was already on court, trying to convince everyone that he was injured enough to qualify for treatment.
The players McDonald was talking about were injured enough that they probably had very good reasons not to go on court at all, but they had $140,000 worth of very good reasons to convince everyone that they were fine.
Before the match, you are the one who decides how badly you are hurt and what exactly is wrong with you. Once the match has started, much less so.
And so a tournament that increased early-round prize money partly to make life more financially sustainable for less wealthy players has, at the same time, directly increased the cost of withdrawing. Naturally, once those players walk on court, the rules have to protect them, protect the competition. Protect the spectacle from tactical stoppages and even decide which kind of pain is entitled to three minutes of treatment. On that front, some players — yes, go on, we can say it, players from the past — did not exactly help with their behaviour. The usual bad influences.
On Sunday, for Terence Atmane, the whole thing came down to one very simple conversation:
“It’s pain.”
“No. It’s cramp.”
The physio decides.
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