A UTS circuit tournament designed by coach Patrick Mouratoglou will be organized in April with Andrey Rublev, Casper Ruud, French number 1 Ugo Humbert and Gaël Monfils on show.
Guillaume Mollaret, correspondent in Nîmes
Winning return? Twenty-six years after a final Davis Cup match (series won 4-1 by France against the Netherlands), tennis will soon return to the clay court of the Nîmes arenas. On April 4 and 5, the ancient monument will host a stage of the UTS League, a circuit parallel to the ATP, designed by French coach Patrick Mouratoglou.
“UTS is a competition that redefines the codes of tennis, to make the sport more intense”explains Patrick Mouratoglou, notably famous for having accompanied Serena Williams, who won 10 Grand Slam tournaments while she trained with him. “UTS matches are timed, with 8 minute quarters (where the first winner of three quarters wins, editor’s note). In addition, players only have one service ball, and the time between points is reduced to 15 seconds.continues the founder of a tournament (broadcast in France on the Channel L’Équipe) bringing together 8 players per weekend and worth a million dollars, including 300,000 for the sole winner.
On the sporting side, we already know half of the participants present in Nîmes: Andrey Rublev, world number 6; Casper Ruud (9th at ATP); French number 1 Ugo Humbert (15th); but also Gaël Monfils (46th). The other athletes should be known by the end of the year. While the Rolex Master 1000 in Monte-Carlo will begin on April 7 (qualifying from April 5), and given the prize money, finding four volunteers should not be the most complicated for UTS… The choice of Nîmes for the he organization of this tournament called “Bastide Médical UTS Nîmes”, the only French stage of this League, owes nothing to chance. Its sponsor and initiator (Bastide Médical, therefore) has its headquarters in French Rome. A home health provider, the group has been supporting tennis players for ten years, including Ugo Humbert. Before him, the company sponsored Jérémy Chardy, now Humbert’s coach, himself a former protégé of… Patrick Mouratoglou! The world of the yellow ball is small.
“Beyond sponsorship, we also put our medical expertise at the service of these high-level athletes whom we support by carrying out personalized studies on their sleep and nutrition. Furthermore, being from Nîmes, I have an extraordinary memory of the Davis Cup quarter-finals won in the arena against Australia in 1991 a few months before France won in Lyon against the United States. The arenas constitute a magical setting for a sporting spectacle”smiles Vincent Bastide, the CEO of the eponymous company. The last time that the Nîmes arenas hosted a sporting event was in 2017. On the occasion of the first stage of the Vuelta, cyclists crossed the track of the two-thousand-year-old monument for a memorable race against the team watch.
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