Serious players don't play these tournaments," Courier criticizes Geneva and Hamburg participants

© AFP

Clément Gehl

le 15/05/2025 à 12h02

1 min to read

Courier Djokovic Genève Hambourg Sinner

This year, many Top 20 players will compete in the Geneva and Hamburg tournaments, which precede Roland-Garros.

While acknowledging that Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic have mitigating circumstances, Jim Courier was highly critical of the others: "There's a lot of insurance at stake for a player like Sinner.

As for Djokovic, he needs these matches because he hasn’t played. He’ll try to do like last year, meaning maybe play two or three matches, then regroup and arrive in Paris with some resilience.

Some of these players will have accepted big guarantees—I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars just to show up—and they don’t need to win a match to get that money, so there’s a commercial aspect to it.

But serious players who think they’re going to win Roland-Garros or compete for Roland-Garros, they don’t play these tournaments. One thing is different this year, and it’s the only time I’ve seen this: there’s an ATP 500 tournament here in Hamburg that’s been slotted into this section.

This doesn’t happen before Wimbledon, nor before the Australian Open and the US Open.