NEW YORK – Armstrong Stadium went quiet for just a moment after Gael Monfils’s last crosscourt winner sailed past Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, and then it remembered: it had a birthday to celebrate.
The crowd erupted into “Happy Birthday,” serenading the Frenchman as he knelt on the Flushing Meadows hardcourt, 40 years old as of Tuesday night and still very much in the business of winning tennis matches. With a 2-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-0 demolition of the Paraguayan qualifier, Monfils became the oldest man to win a US Open match since Jimmy Connors, another performer who understood this crowd, beat Jaime Oncins on his own 40th birthday in 1992. That gap is 34 years. The serendipity is complete: both men turned 40 on court at Flushing Meadows and both won.
The first set was an alarm. Vallejo arrived as a qualifier with something to prove, and Monfils, the showman who has made acrobatic retrievals an art form for two decades, looked exactly like what he is: a 40-year-old whose legs had carried him through mixed doubles with wife Elina Svitolina the week before and now had to face a younger man who knew an upset here would define a career. Vallejo took the opener 6-2. A few rows from the court, Svitolina watched.
Then came the second set, and Monfils went somewhere else entirely.
He fired 37 winners over the course of the match, as Yahoo Sports reported, but most of them landed after that first-set blip. In the third set, Monfils caught a running forehand at full stretch, jumped mid-court, and laced it crosscourt for a winner. The stadium stood. Monfils raised his fist and bowed, not with the self-aware wink he can deploy when he is in trouble, but genuinely, the way a performer bows when he knows a moment has landed. He took the final three sets 6-1, 6-2, 6-0.
“That was definitely very special,” Monfils said during his on-court interview, reaching toward the stands. “To play on the day of my 40th birthday is special.”
The crowd was already singing before he finished the sentence. Monfils, his voice rising over the rendition of “Happy Birthday” still echoing around Armstrong, looked at Svitolina in the seats and pointed. “You guys always make it electric, amazing,” he said.
He is playing his 18th and final US Open. Monfils announced at the start of the season that 2026 would be his last year on tour, and the farewell has unfolded all year; every first-round match was an event in itself, every post-match interview carrying a slight weight that ordinary first-round wins do not carry. He reached the US Open semifinals here in 2016. The crowd that cheered him then was cheering him again, for the last time. “I’m here to also enjoy myself,” he said, voice dropping. “There’s not many times left.”
The previous week, Monfils and Svitolina had pushed their mixed doubles run to the semifinals at Flushing Meadows. That run had ended. His singles campaign had not. Their presence at the tournament, her in the stands for his singles, him on court beside her in doubles, gave the fortnight a quality that pure tennis coverage rarely generates: genuine feeling.
The record his win cements is worth sitting with. Monfils has now won at least one Grand Slam match in 22 consecutive seasons, a streak matched only by Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. Both are retired. He is not. His 34th career US Open victory is also the most ever recorded by a Frenchman at Flushing Meadows.
The wider picture at this tournament only underscores the peculiarity of what Monfils pulled off. Djokovic, 39, was eliminated in the first round, his first first-round Grand Slam exit in 20 years, in a result that removed one of the tournament’s last links to the Federer-Djokovic-Nadal era. Djokovic’s first-round elimination raised the question of whether the court had finally stopped producing the results that era needed. Stan Wawrinka, 41, also fell in round one. Of the three veterans who entered with the possibility of extending their late-career narratives at Flushing Meadows, only Monfils delivered.
The tournament was already unsettled before the first ball was struck. The Alcaraz wrist injury and Sinner’s withdrawal had left the men’s draw unusually open heading into the first week, with the ripple of opportunity running through every first-round match. What nobody had predicted was that a 40-year-old on his announced farewell tour would be among those seizing it.
Next up is Learner Tien, the 14th seed and the American the home crowd will shift toward the moment his first serve lands. Tien is 21 years old. Monfils is 40. The second round at Flushing Meadows will offer a generational gap so extreme it almost reads as a final statement: here is what was, here is what comes next.
But Monfils has spent his career resisting the narratives others want to write for him. He lost that first set to a qualifier he was supposed to handle comfortably. Then he won three in a row without dropping another game in the final two sets. The crowd sang Happy Birthday. He bowed.
This is what the final chapter looks like when you write it yourself.
Related Posts
