Arthur Fery was seven years old when he sat on Court 18 and watched John Isner and Nicolas Mahut play the longest match in tennis history, eleven hours spread across three days. He didn’t know yet he’d spend his own career on that same court, in shorter but no less stubborn instalments, one of them four hours and thirty-nine minutes long, ending with him still standing.
That one came in the third round, against Zizou Bergs: down two sets to one, a double break gone in the fourth, 1-4 again in the decider. Fery won it 2-6, 7-5, 2-6, 7-6(3), 7-6(10-5), breaking into the world’s top 100 in the process. “It’s a really special moment,” he said afterward. “Doing it here is incredibly special for me. It’s my home tournament. It’s where I grew up.”
That last part is not a figure of speech. Fery picked up a racket at five, at Westside Tennis Club fifty metres from his childhood home, then attended King’s College school, a serve and volley from Henman Hill. Born in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres, he played for France at under-12 level before the family settled in London; his mother Olivia competed at Roland Garros in 1991 and remains a long-time All England Club member, his father Loïc a multimillionaire investor and former owner of Ligue 1 club Lorient. None of it made him a guaranteed pro. He shelved tennis for two years as a teenager to focus on school, split his training between an English coach and a French one at Roehampton, and only in 2020 emailed Stanford’s Paul Goldstein to ask about a scholarship