After his lucky break, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard is making the most of his opportunity at Wimbledon. At 6’8”, the giant Frenchman with a serve that has reached a top speed of 151 mph can appear to tower above the rest of the field at the All England Club in more ways than one: after earning his first grand slam win against Sebastian Korda in the opening round, no player has fired as many aces or winners than the 20-year-old. But what is even more notable against Mpetshi Perricard’s breakthrough is that he wasn’t even supposed to be in the main draw. Beaten in the final round of qualifying, he now stands on the brink of the second week of Wimbledon.
The lucky loser has found he has, well, “nothing to lose”. As the top seed in qualifying, Mpetshi Perricard thought his hopes of a Wimbledon debut were over a narrow defeat to compatriot Maxime Janvier. Mpetshi Perricard was left hanging around the locker rooms at the All England Club, holding out for a late withdrawal, when on Sunday night he got the news he was waiting for. He replaced Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in the main draw and took the injured Spaniard’s first-round match against the American seed Korda.
A battle of two big-serves would be an understatement, for Mpetshi Perricard. In a five-set epic that featured four tiebreaks, he fired 51 aces, becoming just the seventh player in history to register more than 50 aces in a single match. As spectors walked around the outside courts on the second day of the tournament, the thump from Mpetshi Perricard’s racket as another serve blitzed past Korda forced them to stop on Court 16, crowding the gangways.
Mpetshi Perricard is the tallest man in the world’s top 100 and Wimbledon may have found its new big man, following the likes of John Isner and Ivo Karlovic. Mpetshi Perricard has highlighted the American and former Wimbledon semi-finalist Isner as an example to mould his game and, so far, his serve has been untouchable. Against Korda, the Frenchman’s serve repeatedly stumped his opponent did so because of its direction and variety as much as its speed and power. Korda, at 6’5”, is a big server himself but his strike was made to look pedestrian against Mpetshi Perricard, who averaged 136 mph throughout.
His has been a remarkable rise since winning his first ATP title in Lyon in May, rising over a 100 places in the rankings. At Queen’s, he earned his first win on grass against the American Ben Shelton, the world number 14. Now, he hopes to carry the spirit of the lucky loser into the second week of Wimbledon.
This year’s tournament brought nine replacement players in the first round, an unusually high number, but the majority were knocked out of the tournament just as quickly as they found themselves in it. Erika Anreeva, who replaced the injured world No 3 Aryna Sabalanka, made it through her first-round match before losing to Donna Vekic. Everyone else fell at the first hurdle of their reprieve, including Andy Murray’s replacement, David Goffin. The Belgian lost a fifth-set decider against Tomas Machac after leading 5-0 in the fifth set.
In most of these cases, a difficult defeat in qualifying has been followed by more disappointment in the main draw: leaving the sense of a chance unfulfilled. Not for Mpetshi Perricard: he cruised into the third round with a 71-minute destruction of Japan’s Yoshihito Nishioka, the shortest player in the top-100 at 5 ‘7″. Despite the rapid 6-4 6-1 6-2 victory, he added to his tallies and by the end of the second round his 78 aces and 143 winners were unmatched by the field. Mpetshi Perricard was also one of only three players yet to be broken, along with Alexander Zverev and Brandon Nakashima. The 20-year-old, though, has faced 13 break points and saved them all.
His reward in the third round is a meeting with Finland’s Emil Ruusuvuori, who stunned the three-time grand slam finalist and 11th seed Stefanos Tsitsipas. Should Mpetshi Perricard’s huge serving lead to another victory at the All England Club, he would find himself in the most open section of the men’s draw, which will produce a first-time Wimbledon quarter-finalist, with Italian Lorenzo Musetti and Argentinian Francisco Comesana waiting in the fourth round.
“For me Wimbledon is the home of tennis, a tennis paradise,” he said. “I watched a lot of finals when I was young. So for me Wimbledon is a special place and a special place to be.” And with a serve like his Mpetshi Perricard could be extending his unlikely stay at the All England Club a little while longer.