Majchrzak vs Monfils — a career at its peak against one taking its bow
Preview · National Bank Open, Montréal (ATP Masters 1000) · First round · 3 August 2026
Rain washed away most of Sunday in Montréal, so Monday becomes a marathon, and the schedulers have saved one of its most emotionally loaded matches for the small hours. Gaël Monfils, 39 and playing out the final season of a career spanning more than two decades, has a main-draw wild card from Tennis Canada. Opposite him is Kamil Majchrzak, a Pole of 30 who has spent 2026 doing the opposite of winding down.
The matchup
Majchrzak broke into the world’s top 50 for the first time this June, and the run that took him there was not a fluke of the rankings calendar. He won the title on grass at ’s-Hertogenbosch, beating Felix Auger-Aliassime, Daniil Medvedev and Alex de Minaur in successive rounds, and pushed his career high to No. 45. Before that he had reached the quarter-finals in Brisbane, the third round in Miami and the second round at Indian Wells, where Novak Djokovic ended him. That is a season of genuine substance from a player who spent years on the fringe of it.
Monfils arrives from a very different place, outside the top 300 after a season played in fragments rather than blocks. His farewell tour has been punctuated by early exits: a first-round defeat at the Australian Open to the qualifier Dane Sweeny, another at Roland Garros to Hugo Gaston. His hard-court ledger this year is slim in matches played and slimmer in matches won.
They have never met, which is faintly remarkable given Monfils has been on tour since Majchrzak was a schoolboy.
Form & conditions
Majchrzak was in Washington last week and produced perhaps the neatest win of his hard-court year, beating Tommy Paul 7-5 7-6(4) before Taylor Fritz stopped him. He therefore comes into Montréal with matches under him on this surface and on this continent, which matters more than usual in a week compressed by weather.
Monfils comes in with a crowd rather than with form. Montréal has always taken to him, and a packed late-night session is precisely where he has historically produced things nobody expected. The problem is that the body no longer reliably underwrites the theatre.
The deciding factor
Rally length. Monfils can still strike a tennis ball as cleanly as almost anyone, and over four or five shots he remains dangerous. What has gone is the capacity to repeat that for two sets against someone who refuses to miss. Majchrzak’s whole 2026 identity is built on exactly that refusal: he defends, he extends, he waits. If he keeps the ball deep and declines to hand over cheap points, he will make Monfils play more balls than the Frenchman wants to play.
The call
The lean is Majchrzak, with medium-high confidence — the ranking gap here understates the gulf in current match-sharpness, and only the occasion argues the other way. The winner is rewarded with 12th seed Learner Tien, a man Majchrzak already beat on hard courts in Miami this year.
