Alexandre Müller, tennis in his stomach

The sun is beating down in Cannes, and Alexandre Müller likes it. He loves the heat. It's a guilty pleasure when, like him, you suffer from Crohn's disease and want to go far in the Roland-Garros tournament, whose main draw begins on Sunday. We manage to squeeze him in one May afternoon, during one of his rare downtimes this season, between an elimination at the Masters 1000 in Rome and a resounding victory against world number 3 Alexander Zverev in Hamburg on Wednesday. Müller takes advantage of a fleeting trip south to settle down at the Elite Tennis Center, a breeding ground for champions on the heights of the French Riviera coast, where he is a cardholder. Former world number 1 Daniil Medvedev was notably shaped there. Müller arrived there in 2023, driven by the same ambition. Everyone there knows him. Children delighted in getting two sentences out of the bartender, saying, "Hey, Alex! Who are you posing for this time?" while laughing during the photoshoot in the restaurant in the center.

His fame is local. The southerner born in Poissy, in the Yvelines, remains little known to the fifty-somethings who are ignorant of tennis but who are assiduous followers of Roland Garros. Will they at least know that, this year, in Hong Kong, Müller won the first ATP tournament of his career? And that, a few weeks after another thunderous final in Rio, he entered the top 40 for the first time, ahead of Gaël Monfils or Corentin Moutet, whose names resonate much more in the mouths of aficionados passing through the