The good Jeremy Chardy is no longer there depending on what battles.
He is 36 years old, his beard is white, his wife and daughter have traveled a few kilometers from the London where they live to go see him, and his body no longer pulls like it used to.
Today Chardy is number 542 in the world and is light years from the number 25 that he had worn in 2013, when French tennis longed for him, and also for Gasquet, Monfils, Gilles Simon or Tsonga.
The good old Jeremy Chardy, weighed down by a battered knee for years, is no longer there depending on what battles, and his deficiencies multiply when he faces Carlos Alcaraz, a teenager in his twenties and as hyper-excited as a schoolboy on the eve of summer vacation. summer.
In a flash, two sets are decided on the side of number 1.
Still, Chardy fights.
And in the middle of the third set, when he has already conceded a donut and has also lost the second set (6-2), he finds a window, one of those bewilderments that Alcaraz has come up with, perhaps a product of tedium, of going too far on the scoreboard, and that's where the French sneaks in: Chardy breaks the Murcian's serve and takes advantage in the set (2-4), but that is a mirage. The next game, Alcaraz returns the break and also brings the French back to earth, actually retiring him, because at the end of the game, if he is defeated, Chardy will leave tennis.
And there are no more concessions.
Chardy contemplates how Alcaraz continues to run after all the balls, a display of youth that has sometimes taken its toll on him, and drawing dizzying lateral runs, and he answers with embarrassing parallels, and there is a moment in which the Frenchman can only applaud the Murcian , hitting the palm of the hand with the strings of the racket, in recognition of the talent of number 1, the tennis player who aspires to become the third Spanish to appropriate the title at Wimbledon (after Santana and Nadal; in women they have won it Conchita Martinez and Muguruza).
The party's epitaph is a two-way highway.
Chardy's journey fades, an ATP title endorses him (apart from a Wimbledon title in juniors) and the drift of Alcaraz, the fashionable tennis player, the breath of fresh air that excites tennis bureaucrats, now that the Big Three faces fall.
When Chardy leaves through the corridors, he does so in silence, barely applauded by his wife and daughter, and the rawness of the scene is further intensified by recovering past scenes from the same day, the moment in which Roger Federer had appeared in the Center Court to live a wonderful tribute.
Life is contrasts.
