For about forty minutes in Montreal, Jack Draper was the player who reached number four in the world. Then the third set began, the arm stopped answering, and a man who had waited two months to get back on a court sat down at a change of ends and wiped away tears in front of everyone.
Key takeaways
- Draper lost 6-3 2-6 6-2 to France's Terence Atmane on a main-draw wildcard in Montreal.
- It was his first match since June, after a persistent problem with bone bruising in his left arm.
- His ranking has fallen from fourth in the world to outside the top 130 inside 12 months.
- He holds a Cincinnati wildcard for next week — now in serious doubt, as is the US Open from 30 August.
- Jessica Pegula, his expected mixed doubles partner in New York, says his health comes first.
Two false starts, then finally a court
The detail that mattered before a ball was struck: Draper walked out without the compression sleeve that had strapped his arm through recent appearances. After the arm injury that forced him out of last year's US Open — bone bruising that had been troubling him since the early summer — that bare arm was meant to be the signal that something had genuinely healed.
The saga is now almost a year old. Draper arrived at Flushing Meadows in 2025 as the fifth seed, won his opening match against Federico Agustin Gomez and then pulled out before the second round, the problem diagnosed as a bruised humerus, the bone running from shoulder to elbow. No men's top-five seed had ever withdrawn mid-tournament at the US Open in the Open era. He did not play again that season.
It was a brutal interruption to the best spell of his career. In March 2025 he had routed Holger Rune 6-2 6-2 in the Indian Wells final to win his first Masters 1000 title and break into the top 10, and by June he had climbed to his career-high of fourth.
Getting there at all was an achievement. Comebacks had been announced and then withdrawn twice this summer, at Wimbledon and at the Washington Open. Montreal, on a main-draw wildcard, was the third attempt and the first that survived contact with an actual opponent.
The Wimbledon withdrawal hurt most. Draper had won three matches in straight sets at Eastbourne before losing his semi-final to Ugo Humbert, only to pull out on 29 June, the day before he was due to face Taylor Fritz on Centre Court, citing a recurrence of the arm injury. He called it the worst of "a lot of painful moments in the last 12 months", adding that there was no greater honour for a British player than competing at Wimbledon. Montreal was only his sixth tournament of the year.
He looked nervous early, which was hardly a surprise for a 24-year-old whose ranking had slid from fourth to outside the top 130 in a year. By the third game he was smiling — reading a difficult Atmane serve and producing a winner nobody in the building expected, hauling the game back to deuce.
The second set was the old Draper
Atmane took the opener 6-3, with Draper unable to manufacture a break. Then the second set arrived and, briefly, so did 2025.
The flat, heavy hitting came back. A cross-court forehand drew a roar from the Montreal crowd, and he ran out the set 6-2 looking like a man about to complete one of those comeback stories that gets replayed all season.
For one set he was the 2024 US Open semi-finalist again — the ball-striking that took him to world number four, intact and unmistakable. That is exactly what made the third set so hard to watch.
The third set, game by game
What followed was not a player being outplayed. It was a body running out.
How it unravelled
- Game 1 — Draper leads 40-15 on serve and loses it anyway.
- Game 4 — a break point handed to him; he nets a tired forehand and it's gone.
- Game 5 — broken again for 4-1. At the change of ends, he sits down in tears.
- Then — Atmane serves it out. 6-2, and a first-round exit.
The drop-off was visible from the stands: the pace on his serve and groundstrokes faded sharply in the decider, and the errors followed. Commentating for Sky Sports, Annabel Croft captured the moment Draper sat hunched on his chair at the changeover.
"This is pretty emotional. He's bent over and literally erupting with emotion here."
— Annabel Croft, Sky Sports commentator
None of this should diminish Atmane, who was no soft landing for a comeback. The 24-year-old French left-hander made his name at the 2025 Cincinnati Open, where he came through qualifying and beat Taylor Fritz for his first top-10 win and Holger Rune on the way to a semi-final against Jannik Sinner. He reached a career-high of 41st in April, and this was his 13th win of 2026.
Atmane moves on to face Russia's Karen Khachanov in the second round, a result that will be a footnote to almost everyone who watched this match.
What it costs him: Cincinnati, then New York
Draper has a wildcard for the Cincinnati Open, which begins next week. On the evidence of a third set he could not physically finish, playing it looks unlikely — and behind Cincinnati sits the far bigger date, the US Open starting 30 August, at the tournament where the arm finally gave way last year.
There is also a doubles plan in New York. He was expected to reunite with Jessica Pegula in the revamped mixed event, where the pair reached the semi-finals in 2025. Speaking in Toronto before her own tournament, Pegula made clear the entry is now conditional on something more important than a draw sheet.
"We're supposed to play [the US Open]. Obviously I know he's not healthy, so we'll see how that goes. He's a really nice kid, so I enjoy playing with him. Hoping that he can just get healthy and we can see him back out there."
— Jessica Pegula
The awkward truth about the ranking
A fall from fourth to outside the top 130 is not a form slump; it is the ranking system doing exactly what it is built to do to a player who cannot enter tournaments. Every week Draper misses, last year's points drop off and nothing replaces them.
That is why wildcards — Montreal, Cincinnati — matter so much right now, and why the temptation to use them is so dangerous. Each one is a chance to stop the slide. Each one is also a chance to do what happened in Montreal: play two good sets on an arm that is not ready, and pay for it.
Elsewhere in the draw, there was a straightforwardly good British result. Jacob Fearnley, the British number five, beat France's Adrian Mannarino 7-6 6-4 and meets the Czech Republic's Jakub Mensik next.
The bottom line
The scoreline says first-round exit. The match said something more useful and more worrying: the tennis is still there, and the arm is not. Draper proved in one set that he can still hurt a tour-level opponent — then proved over the next three games that he cannot yet do it for two hours. Cincinnati now looks like a decision about restraint rather than opportunity, and the honest read is that the US Open, not August, should be the thing he protects.
