Dzumhur, the next rival of Alcaraz: from scare to fall to forget that he won the game | ATP Tour

Roland Garros

Dzumhur, the next rival of Alcaraz: from scare to fall to forget that he won the game

The Bosnium gave one of Wednesday’s surprises in Roland Garros

May 28, 2025

Damir Dzumhur seemed completely moving away from his illusion of being a rival of Carlos Alcaraz in Roland Garros when on Wednesday he fell on the fourth set against Frenchman Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard and thought he could not continue.

“I asked the physiotherapist if I had only hit me, if it was just a bruise,” Dzumhur told Alex Corretja in his interview on the court. “They told me that I had nothing wrong with my knee, which was just a blow, so I kept playing.”

The Bosnium got up and put his focus with such intensity in continuing to fight that he even won 7-6 (4), 6-3, 4-6, 6-4. “I felt stressed in the third set after losing my service, the truth. And then, in the fourth set, the situation was practically the same. In fact, I didn’t know I was taking out to win the game, so maybe it was better.”

The drama has always been part of Damir Dzumhur’s life. And not only because he was born in May 1992, in the midst of the Bosnian war and in a hospital that had to be evacuated five days later by the imminence of the bombings.

And between 2006 and 2007, Damir acted in war films (Grbavica and Sniper Valley). Yes, before being a professional tennis player, Dzumhur was an actor. And he had a greater prominence in the second production when he played Duran, an Albanian boy looking for who had killed his parents.

“I seem to last because in life, as in tennis, I never give up,” said the Bosnium a few years ago in an interview with Atptour.com.

After he finished his career at the ATP Tour, in which he has been three times champion and member of the Top 25 (2018), the right -hander of 33 years does not rule out acting again.

For now, the next challenge of the world No. 69 is called Carlos Alcaraz, with whom he faced only one occasion in the past: in the final of a Challenger played five years ago in Barcelona. The Spanish, then 17 years old, prevailed in three sets.