There’s a lot to unpack in this blog.

But coincidentally, there wasn’t much for me to unpack when I landed in Rennes last week…

After Cassis, I was planning to have a training week in Bath before I flew out to my next couple of tournaments in Sweden. But, after landing home at 11:30pm on Thursday night, it was only about 12 hours before I found out that I had got into qualifying for the singles of a Challenger 100 event in Rennes, which started on Sunday. 

I got back to my house at around 1:30am on Friday morning and no sooner than at 6am on Saturday morning I was leaving again to return to France. It was a nice little 29 hour pitstop, but I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to play another Challenger.

The trip back to France started out just like any of the other hundreds of international journeys I have done over the past couple of years. I flew from Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris; I had a 90 minute layover; and then I caught a 35 minute flight from Paris to Rennes. It seemed like a simple journey, and considering that the plane I landed into Paris on and the plane I left for Rennes on were parked side by side on the tarmac, you would assume it would be quite a simple task for my luggage to be transferred from one plane to the other.

Unfortunately, that was not the case…

When I arrived in Rennes, I checked the location of my bag, which had an AirTag in it, only to find that it was still in Paris. Disaster.

Pro travel tip: put an AirTag in your luggage when you fly so you can always be sure of its location – even if it’s 400km away in a different French city…

I made my way to the baggage help desk in Rennes airport to make a lost luggage report and was told that my bag would likely arrive on the next flight from Paris. The next flight landed at 4pm on Sunday. Qualies started at 10am on Sunday.

Luckily though, perhaps by some divine intervention, I had an epiphany while I was checking into my flight at Heathrow. I called my mum to tell her that I thought something was going to go wrong with my flight that day, and for the first time ever, I took two rackets out of my bag and took them onto the flight as hand luggage.

I know some players do this all the time, but I’ve also heard horror stories of people trying to take rackets through security and having them thrown into a bin because they “could be used as a weapon on the flight”…

Luckily at Heathrow they didn’t bat an eyelid at my rackets in security, probably because they were more interested in trying to catch Daniel Khalife who had just escaped from Wandsworth prison a couple of days earlier. Thanks, Daniel.

So, I turned up to the tournament site in Rennes with two rackets, my tennis shoes and the clothes on my back. I had spent the best part of an hour at the airport filling in the lost luggage report, hadn’t eaten lunch, and after the 40 minute journey to the tournament site, I was told the practice/qualifying venue was another 20 minute drive away in a town called Saint-Grégoire. 

One major issue that became apparent when I stepped on court for my practice on Saturday afternoon was that the indoor centre was absurdly hot and humid.

For context, I sweat a lot when I play and so wristbands are an essential item of clothing that I need to wear for every single match, whether it’s indoors or outdoors. If I don’t, sweat will drip down my arm onto my grips and I won’t be able to hold the racket. Unfortunately for me, all of my wristbands were sat at Charles de Gaulle airport, so whenever I sat down for a drink during my practice, I was texting my mum and dad asking to see if they could find a local sports or tennis shop that might sell some wristbands and some kit I could wear for my match.

It took about one hour of my two hour practice for my parents to find a tennis shop in Rennes that was still open and I had to run to the players desk mid-practice to arrange for someone to take me to the shop before it closed that evening.

I finished my practice at 6pm and headed straight into the tournament transport which luckily drove me 15 minutes out of their way to get me to the tennis shop before it closed at 7pm. After buying three sets of Wilson wristbands and a Fila match kit that would make even Billy Harris proud, I was ready for my qualies match the following day.

I also did some additional DIY laundry in the hotel so that I had some kit to wear for my warm up on Sunday as well…

The tournament referee in Rennes was an absolute legend – it turns out she had also lost her luggage flying from Paris to Rennes the previous day – and she agreed to schedule my match as the last one on Sunday in the hopes that my bag would arrive before I got on court. As is always the case though, when you need matches to last longer, they go quicker. There was an early walkover on my court and so there was no chance my luggage was going to make it to me before the match.

After warming up on the main draw practice court (which was just a basketball court with a tennis court laid over the top of it), I showered, grabbed a towel from the hotel and headed to the qualifying venue. Now, I cannot stress enough how much of a bunny* I felt like when I walked onto court with my Nike hand luggage bag that had two rackets sticking out of it. The guy that I was playing must have thought I had just walked in off the street and was some sort of club player.

Yet, despite all the adversity (😉) I had faced, I overcame it all and wrapped up my first Challenger singles win in just over two hours. And, what was even better news was that while I was on court, my luggage had been delivered to the main tournament site. Just in time…

Coincidentally, when I got my ATP ranking for the first time a few years ago in Belarus, I had also lost my bag on the way to the tournament and couldn’t practice for the two days before as I had no rackets with me. Perhaps there is some underlying psychology behind two milestone moments in my career coming after losing my bag and my pre-tournament preparations being scuppered…

Maybe the following day I should have turned up with two rackets and my hand luggage again because I went down to a French boy in the last round of qualies… tough.

While all of my shenanigans were going on at the qualifying venue, the centre court in Rennes town centre was heating up. They had laid the centre court (and the two qualies courts) a couple of days before the tournament in a theatre in the middle of the town. The theatre was so well-equipped that players were being introduced to court with ATP Finals-style music, light shows, fire and smoke. Even Luke Johnson was getting in on the walkout action.

There was also a ‘Village de l’Open” set up outside of the theatre with a restaurant, a bar, a giant screen showing the tennis and mini-tennis courts for spectators to use during the event.

On the Monday night, I watched Richard Gasquet and Youtube sensation, Jules Marie, battle it out in their first round match in front of about 1500 people. In typical French fashion, the atmosphere in Le Liberté (the name of the theatre) was electric, mainly because Jules’ army of Youtube followers, affectionately known as ‘Les Breakers’, had packed out the stands. It was so cool to see that amount of support for a tournament of that level and it is really one of many examples of just how much the French love their tennis and their sport in general. Maybe there are some things the UK could learn from France about hosting sporting events like this…

At Challengers, lucky loser slots are decided by ranking and so as the lowest-ranked player to lose in the final round of qualifying, I had approximately a 0% chance of getting one of those spots. My partner and I were also 1 spot out from getting into the doubles event which was a shame, but I’d had a great couple of matches and gained more invaluable experience of competing at this level, despite the loss of my luggage at the start of the trip.

On the way home I decided to take the Eurostar instead of flying so that I could keep an eye on my luggage at all times…