NEW YORK – Down two sets and one break during the first round of the US Open, Térence Atmane stopped moving. The 24-year-old Frenchman was serving 7-6, 6-3, 1-0, 40-40 against Spaniard Jaume Munar when he suddenly froze, clutching the top of his right leg and lumbering down the baseline as if he were doing a physical comedy performance. After trying to get his leg to move the way he wanted, he limped. agonizingly slow to his chair and called a coach onto the court. After an initial assessment, Atmane received treatment on his leg, which left Munar unimpressed. “We all know it, now what?” ” he asked the chair umpire. US Open 2026 Preview Ava Wallace and Jen Klockner Two sets later, Munar was up 2-1 on serve in the fifth set, having leveled the match at two sets overall. Atmane called the coach for treatment on his legs, but during the evaluation, the coach refused to treat him. Atmane said “it’s pain, not cramps” on multiple occasions, but the coach still refused to treat him. “Stop acting. stupidly and treat me, I’m in pain, pain,” Atmane said. When the coach left, Atmane asked to see the coach’s credentials to know his name, which the coach refused to show. Medical timeouts are not allowed for cramps, but the rule surrounding their evaluation is subjective. Coaches have to respond to what an affected player tells them, and players also sometimes don’t know what an injury is or, in the case of cramps, whether they actually have an injury or not. Players can treat cramps in a maximum of three swings, each lasting a 60-second sit. A similar situation developed in the 2026 Australian Open semi-finals, when Carlos Alcaraz suffered cramps against Alexander Zverev while playing a lead two set match. What else should it be? This is absolute bullshit. That’s amazing. That can’t be. “You can’t be serious,” Zverev told the match supervisor in German at the time. “At first it was in a specific muscle, so at first I didn’t think it was a cramp at all,” Alcaraz said at a press conference, after winning the match in five sets. 7-5 and raised his arms to the crowd in defiance when he finished. The two incidents exemplify a problem with the rules on cramps. While a medical evaluation is done to distinguish between muscle injuries and cramps, the decision between adequate treatment and some largely ineffective massages is based on a belief test. This makes it almost impossible to have consistency and causes confusion among players and fans when the topic arises. underarm serves. Not the soft, sneaky kind that players use as a sneak attack, but regular forehands. The cramp spread to the other leg and then to the left hand. He even hit two forehand serves with his right hand, trying almost every tactic possible (hyper-aggressive shots, drop shots) but it didn’t work. On the other side of the net, Munar found the clarity that can often elude players against injured opponents. sadists with Atmane barely able to make a move. From 1-0, 40-40, Atmane won six points and Munar took the third set 6-1. In the last two games, Atmane was on the verge of collapse (when players lose deliberately to conserve energy or out of anger), but received a code violation for delaying a game and also lost his first serve midway through the set after taking more than 25 seconds to serve. produced a funny situation in which neither player seemed to know what the rules were regarding the difference between loss of serve and a code violation for delaying a game. Between the third and fourth sets, Munar told the chair umpire that he was very focused on Atmane being properly warned, because he had lost to Diego Schwartzman, who Munar said was “crampy as hell” in the 2018 tournament. Eight years is a long time for the trauma of losing a cramp to linger. At 15-40, Atmane again approached the chair umpire to complain that Atmane had had a two-way conversation with his team for what he said was the third time. allow two-way conversations during regular play. During the discussion between Munar and the referee, Atmane stood by his team and spoke. The supervisor then told them not to have a two-way conversation. Munar’s pause seemed to give Atmane a chance to recover, and he played with renewed vigor, but Munar still broke serve to lead the fourth set 1-0. Atmane’s team started to get going and he broke to reach 3-3, before saving a break point in the seventh game to take the lead. The match started to feel at least somewhat normal again, and the fourth set went to a tiebreaker, which Munar won to send the match into the distance.
