ATP: Unseeded trio bring French flair to Cincy

Motivated Mannarino to face Sinner

He may be pushing 40 but Adrian Mannarino is not done fighting.  

The 37-year-old beat three top-50 players in a row – Jordan Thompson (No.50), Tomas Machac (No.24), and Tommy Paul (No.16) – and has won five matches in six days, through qualifying and the main draw, to reach the round of 16 in Cincinnati for the second time in three years.

Mannarino had a tough start to 2025.

He lost 11 of his first 12 matches of the year, dropping to as low as 145 in the world in March, just 13 months after he was ranked a career-high No.17.

Things are slowly turning around for the French veteran though.

He successfully qualified for the Wimbledon main draw last month and reached the third round, he made the final of the grass-court Challenger in Newport, and has now made the last 16 in Cincinnati, as a qualifier.

Having turned pro 21 years ago, Mannarino would be forgiven if he doesn’t feel like grinding through qualifying rounds or rebuilding his ranking on the Challenger Tour at this stage in his career. But that hasn’t been the case.

“That’s the thing – you cannot be a spoiled child. Wherever you’re playing, whether it’s a Challenger, or a Grand Slam, you have to be hungry, you need to be motivated,” he recently told Talking Tennis at the Newport Challenger.

Before Toronto, Mannarino had just four tour-level victories under his belt this season. He has added four more since and will now take on world No.1 and Cincinnati defending champion Jannik Sinner for a chance of reaching the quarter-finals.

“I’m happy actually, I'm still motivated. Maybe it's hard for some people to see me still fighting at 37, but I love this sport. I love fighting on court,” he told Tennis TV on Monday after he knocked out the 13th-seeded Paul in three sets.

“You still need to improve every day because all the young players are working hard, playing well, so if I keep my level, I'm going to be down. So I have to keep improving and this is why it's interesting in this sport.”

Bonzi hits new milestone

Two of Benjamin Bonzi’s three career top-10 victories have come this summer – one over Daniil Medvedev in the opening round at Wimbledon and the other against Lorenzo Musetti in the Cincinnati second round.

The 29-year-old from Nîmes had a strong finish to 2024, winning 21 of his last 22 matches of the season – a stretch that included two Challenger trophies and a maiden ATP title on home soil in Metz.

“If you had said to me that six weeks earlier, I [would] tell you that you’re a liar. But now everything is true,” Bonzi told atptour.com at the end of his last campaign.

“I felt amazing on the courts [in] the last few weeks on the Challenger Tour and the ATP Tour. I think that my level came back, especially on the on the mental part, and the way I managed all those things that I've been through on the court. I know I can face a lot of things on the court and be ready for everything. That was maybe not the case all the year.”

In Cincinnati this week, Bonzi followed his third-set tiebreak victory over eighth-seeded Musetti with a three-set win against No.25 seed Tsitsipas to reach the last 16 at a Masters 1000 event for the first time.

A third consecutive seed awaits in the round of 16 in the form of No.23 Felix Auger-Aliassime.

Atmane on the rise

Another French qualifier making waves this week in Cincy is the 23-year-old Terence Atmane, whose Instagram name is ‘The Magician’, because he enjoys doing magic tricks during his time off.

A serious Pokémon card collector with some serious lefty flair on the tennis court, Atmane had just one tour-level victory in 2025 prior to his run to the last 16 in Cincinnati this week.

The world No.136 upset 15th-seeded Flavio Cobolli and promising Brazilian Joao Fonseca before setting up a fourth-round clash with American world No.4 Taylor Fritz.

Diagnosed as a person with High Intellectual Potential (HIP), Atmane relies more on instinct than tactics, and likes to mix things up on the court to throw off his opponents.

“I have a very instinctive mind. It's almost impossible to talk to me about tactics: if someone tells me to play once cross court, once down the line, and once cross court, I lose all my composure,” Atmane said on L’Equipe’s podcast Au-delà du top 100.

“If someone tells me to play that, I'll do the opposite, because it annoys me to be told what to do on the court.

“Being HIP means I'm able to create surprises on the court. That can unsettle players.”

Atmane is 0-3 against top-10 opposition throughout his young career and has lost to Fritz in their sole previous meeting, in Shanghai last year.