{"id":101787,"date":"2026-04-13T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=101787"},"modified":"2026-04-10T16:02:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T20:02:25","slug":"jack-draper-arthur-fils-jakub-mensik-too-fragile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2026\/04\/13\/jack-draper-arthur-fils-jakub-mensik-too-fragile\/","title":{"rendered":"Fragile Gold: Are Arthur Fils, Jack Draper and Jakub Mensik Already Too Broken to Fulfil Their Potential?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is one very annoying type of frustration that tennis fans have had to get used to over the years. A young player bursts onto the scene, wins something spectacular, climbs the rankings, and then vanishes. Most of the time it\u2019s not because of a loss, or a slump but simply because their body gave out.\u00a0<\/span>Arthur Fils, Jack Draper and Jakub Mensik are three of the most talented players of their generation. Each of them looks, on their best days, like a future world number one. And each of them has spent a deeply alarming amount of time watching tournaments from a treatment table rather than a baseline.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question worth asking is not simply whether these three have been unlucky. It is whether the pattern of injury they have each accumulated by their early twenties represents something genuinely worrying about their long-term futures, or whether it is a growing pain that the best players almost always navigate on the way to the top.<\/span><\/p>\n

Are Arthur Fils, Jack Draper and Jakub Mensik too fragile?<\/h2>\n

The Injury Ledger Is Already Heavy<\/b><\/h4>\n

The details are worth laying out plainly, because the cumulative picture is striking.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arthur Fils suffered a back stress fracture at Roland Garros in May 2025, which forced him to withdraw before the third round. He tried to rush back, returning in Toronto, but withdrew from the US Open shortly after, citing a warning sign felt during his comeback. He subsequently missed the Australian Open as his recovery continued, ending up away from the tour for the better part of eight months.<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes Fils’s situation particularly concerning is that this was not a freakish one-off. He has had back problems since the age of 15, including a herniated disc in the L5 vertebra. The back is, by his own admission, a structurally fragile part of his body that he will likely manage for the rest of his career.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Jack Draper’s injury history reads like a medical dictionary. He was sidelined in 2023 and 2024 due to abdominal and shoulder injuries, while hip tendinitis disrupted his preparation heading into the 2025 season. He gutted out three consecutive five-set wins at the Australian Open only to retire in the fourth round against Carlos Alcaraz due to hip tendinitis, admitting he had been taking a lot of painkillers just to get through the week.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, just as he was hitting perhaps the best tennis of his career, winning a Masters 1000 title at Indian Wells and reaching a career-high ranking of world number four, a bone bruise in his left humerus ended his season and forced him to miss the Australian Open the following year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mensik is the youngest of the three, born in 2005, and his injury log is already surprisingly long. An elbow problem in 2024 wiped out most of his clay season and forced his team to essentially rebuild his serve motion from scratch. He then nearly withdrew from the 2025 Miami Open due to significant knee inflammation before a physio talked him into competing, and went on to win the title. At the 2026 Australian Open, he reached the fourth round before withdrawing with an abdominal muscle injury. He has since pulled out of Monte-Carlo with a toe injury. He is still only 20 years old.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Tour Itself Is Part of the Problem<\/b><\/h4>\n

It would be convenient to pin this entirely on the individual misfortune of three young men. But the broader context matters enormously here. In 2025, there were 37 instances on the ATP Tour of a player retiring during a match or withdrawing mid-tournament, equalling the highest number at that point in the calendar over the past 20 years and around 50% higher than the annual average. This is not a coincidence. Men’s Grand Slam matches are now 23% longer on average than they were in 1999, yet the average number of tournaments played by top 100 players has barely changed in that same period.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Players are hitting harder, running further, and competing on slower courts that demand longer rallies and greater physical output, all within a schedule that has no meaningful off-season. The rate of walkovers and retirements due to injury at Grand Slams and Masters 1000 events in 2025 reached 5.5%, the highest in 20 years by a significant margin, well above the average of 3.8%. Many have complained about it. Most of them have fallen on deaf ears.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For young players like Fils, Draper and Mensik, who are still physically developing while simultaneously being asked to compete at the highest level week after week, the system is particularly unforgiving. Their bodies have not yet fully settled into the frame of a mature professional athlete, yet they are already absorbing the full load of the tour.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reason for Concern, Not Despair<\/b><\/h4>\n

The reassuring counterargument is that this is, in many ways, the story of almost every great player. Novak Djokovic had significant wrist problems early in his career. Rafael Nadal has spent entire seasons managing a left knee that seemingly should have ended his career a decade before it did. Even Roger Federer, the player whose longevity has become almost mythological, had his most dominant years interrupted by mono and knee surgery. The difference between those players and the ones who fell away permanently was rarely talent. It was largely the quality of medical support around them, the wisdom to make the right decisions when it mattered, and the physical luck not to suffer the kind of catastrophic structural injury that genuinely cannot be managed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The signs from all three players suggest they understand what is at stake. Fils has spoken at length about overhauling his diet and his physical preparation during his eight months away, and has also made technical adjustments to his forehand to reduce strain. Draper has acknowledged he needs to be smarter about managing load, and has hired new coaching support. Mensik won a Masters 1000 title at 19 playing through knee pain, which proves his mental fortitude, though it also raises questions about whether the culture around young players encourages them to push through warning signs rather than heed them.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The genuinely worrying cases in tennis history are not the players who got injured young. They are the players who got injured in the same place repeatedly, ignored the structural causes, and paid for it later. Del Potro’s wrist is the cautionary tale that expert observers already cite when discussing Draper’s arm. What that comparison underlines is not that Draper is doomed, but that the conversations happening right now, about biomechanics, about scheduling, about load management, are exactly the right ones to be having.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fils, Draper and Mensik are not fragile in the way that should make anyone write them off. They are fragile in the way that all elite athletes are fragile when they are young, powerful, and being asked to do too much too soon by a sport that has not yet found a way to protect them from themselves. The talent is real. The ceiling is extraordinary. Whether they reach it depends less on what happens on the court than on what happens in the treatment room, and whether the ATP summons the institutional will to acknowledge that its schedule is quietly eating its own future stars.<\/span><\/p>\n

Main photo credit: Mike Frey-USA TODAY Sports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is one very annoying type of frustration that tennis fans have had to get used to over the years. A young player bursts onto the scene, wins something spectacular, climbs the rankings, and then vanishes. Most of the time it\u2019s not because of a loss, or a slump but simply because their body gave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5393,"featured_media":68651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[18371,2806,1625,11131,18805],"class_list":["post-101787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","tag-arthur-fils","tag-atp-monte-carlo","tag-atp-next-gen","tag-jack-draper","tag-jakub-mensik"],"modified_by":"Jim Smith","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101787"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102009,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101787\/revisions\/102009"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}