Famous French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga announced his imminent retirement from professional career. The athlete said that his last tournament will be the home Roland Garros, which will be held in May-June in Paris (France). The correspondent of bbabo.net talks about the main achievements of Tsonga, as well as what connects him with Kazakhstan.
The tennis player will celebrate his 37th birthday next week. He is one of the brightest representatives of French tennis in the late 2000s and early 100s. Jo-Wilfried has 18 singles titles in the ATP tournaments, and in 2012 he reached the fifth line in the world classification.
The best achievement in the Grand Slam tournaments was reaching the final at the Australian Open-2008. It was generally the first final in the ATP tour for the Frenchman, and in it he managed to win the starting set - 6:4. But the next three games were played by Serb Novak Djokovic, who that evening won the first title of the Grand Slam series (now he has 20 of them) - 4:6, 3:6, 6:7(2).
Five more times Tsonga made it to the semi-final stage. It happened twice at Roland Garros (2013, 2015) and Wimbledon (2011, 2012), and once at the Australian Open (2010). Jo-Wilfried also has two victories in the ATP Masters 1000 category tournaments and a triumph in the 2017 Davis Cup. At junior level, Tsonga won the 2003 US Open.
During his career, he beat Roger Federer and Djokovic six times, turned out to be stronger than Rafael Nadal four times, upset Stan Wawrinka three times, left Andy Murray out of work twice. He also leads head-to-head against Lleyton Hewitt (4-0), Carlos Moya (2-0), Dominic Thiem (2-1), Alexander Zverev (2-1), Marat Safin (1-0), Stefanos Tsitsipas (1-0) and other famous tennis players.
Against Kazakh tennis players, Tsonga has a total score of 5-0. He defeated Andrey Golubev three times, and the most difficult was the first round match at Wimbledon in 2009. Then Jo-Wilfried had to work hard to break Golubev's resistance - 6:3, 5:7, 7:6(4), 7:6(5).
Tsonga also played against Alexei Kedryuk and Alexander Nedovesov. The Frenchman defeated Kedruk at the ITF home tournament in 2007, and defeated Nedovesov in three sets at the US Open-2014 in the second round.
But Jo-Wilfried is even more connected with Kazakhstan by his arrival in 2014 for a charity exhibition match against Nadal in Nur-Sultan. Then Rafa was ranked second in the ATP world rankings, and Tsonga was in 12th place.
In the match, which took place in the capital's National Tennis Center, Nadal won - 6:7 (2), 6:3, 6:4. But Tsonga and Rafa made a real show for local tennis fans, most of whom saw the world's court stars for the first time with their own eyes.
Interestingly, the current President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, as well as Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who is currently the Head of State, watched the meeting live at that time.
Note that in recent years, Tsonga had a lot of health problems, because of which he was out of action for a long time. During his career, he earned $22.4 million in prize money, or 10.4 billion tenge.
Photo: Tennis World USA (1, 2), bbabo.net (3, 4)
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