It was certainly a season of two halves for Quentin Halys. Before Wimbledon, he was outside the top 200 in the ATP Rankings and it looked like he might struggle to make the US Open qualifying draw. But it wasn’t long before he actually reached a career milestone and was back within the world’s best hundred. How did he pull it off?<\/p>\n
With just one Challenger semifinal in the first six months of the year, Halys was on track for his worst season since 2020. He was also unable to produce anything but the Australian Open first-round win over Lloyd Harris on the main tour. Wimbledon was already looking like a key event for him as the Frenchman produced a strong run at SW19 in 2023 (crushed Daniel Evans and Aleksandar Vukic, took a set off eventual finalist Jannik Sinner).<\/p>\n
Starting from the qualifying draw this time, it was already a minor surprise that Halys made it to the main event. But he took apart Beibit Zhukayev’s big serve without even needing a tie-break in the final round and got through a tricky section to match his 2023 achievement. He defeated last year’s quarterfinalist Christopher Eubanks, took down #21 seed Karen Khachanov, and went two sets to love up on 15th seed Holger Rune. Blowing that lead was painful with plenty of nerves in the fourth set tie-break, but it laid the foundation for Halys’s return to the top of the sport.<\/p>\n
Now it was all about keeping that momentum up. His next event after Wimbledon was the ATP 250 in Gstaad and that almost ended in disaster. Halys was two points away from defeat at the hands of Giovanni Fonio in the first round of qualifying, suddenly turning things around to make his second ATP Tour SF and eventually beat Jan-Lennard Struff to reach the final. Matteo Berrettini proved far too strong as he grabbed the Gstaad\/Kitzbuhel high altitude clay double, but earning 178 points meant that the Frenchman was getting closer and closer to a top 100 return.<\/p>\n
Halys kept playing solidly in the latter months of the season, finishing runner-up at Challengers in Rennes<\/a> (to Jacob Fearnley after having two match points) and Mouilleron-le-Captif<\/a> (to Lucas Pouille). He was also very successful in ATP Tour qualifying campaigns, going 14-0 since Wimbledon onwards. One of them turned into a quarterfinal in Metz (lost to eventual champion Benjamin Bonzi), while players like Grigor Dimitrov, Gael Monfils, or Francisco Cerundolo kept escaping him after tight opening sets.<\/p>\n Where does it leave Halys ahead of 2025? In a better starting position than last season at world #72. But even that doesn’t tell the full story as the Frenchman will have his opportunities to break his career-high of #61, considering he’s not defending all that much in the first half of the year. If his form continues to trend like it did late in 2024, an attack on the world’s top 50 isn’t going to be impossible for the 28-year-old.<\/p>\n Main photo credit: David Kirouac-USA TODAY Sports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was certainly a season of two halves for Quentin Halys. Before Wimbledon, he was outside the top 200 in the ATP Rankings and it looked like he might struggle to make the US Open qualifying draw. But it wasn’t long before he actually reached a career milestone and was back within the world’s best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2968,"featured_media":61004,"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":[390],"class_list":["post-76517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","tag-quentin-halys"],"modified_by":"Jim Smith","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76517","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\/2968"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76517"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76580,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76517\/revisions\/76580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}