NEW YORK — Up two sets and a break during the first round of the U.S. Open, Térence Atmane stopped moving.
The 24-year-old Frenchman was serving up 7-6, 6-3, 1-0, 40-40 against Spain’s Jaume Munar when he suddenly froze, gripping his upper right leg and lumbering about the baseline like he was doing a physical comedy performance.
After trying to get his leg to move in the way he wanted, he limped agonizingly slowly to his chair and called a trainer to the court. After an initial evaluation, Atmane received treatment on his leg — which left Munar unimpressed.
“We all know, and now what?” he asked the chair umpire.
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Two sets later, Munar was up 2-1 on serve in the fifth set, having leveled the match at two sets all. Atmane called the trainer for treatment on his legs, but during the evaluation, the trainer declined to treat him. Atmane said “it is pain, not cramp” on multiple occasions, but the trainer still declined to treat him.
“Stop acting stupid and treat me, I have pain, p-a-i-n,” Atmane said.
As the trainer left, Atmane asked to see the trainer’s credential to learn his name, which the trainer declined to show.
Medical timeouts are not permitted for cramps, but the rule surrounding their evaluation is subjective. Trainers have to respond to what they are told by a stricken player, and players also sometimes do not know what an injury is, or, in the case of cramps, whether or not they actually have an injury at all.
Players are allowed to treat cramps at three changeovers maximum, each of which lasts for a 60-second sitdown.
A similar situation unfolded in the 2026 Australian Open semifinals, when Carlos Alcaraz cramped up against Alexander Zverev while holding a two-set lead. Alcaraz also received treatment, having told the physio that he believed he had a muscle injury.
“He has cramps. What else should it be? This is absolute b——. That is unbelievable. That can not be. You can not be serious,” Zverev said in German to the match supervisor at the time.
“In the beginning it was on a specific muscle, so I didn’t think it was cramp at all at the beginning,” Alcaraz said in a news conference, after winning the match in five sets.
Atmane couldn’t do the same. Munar broke in the 12th game of the fifth set to complete a 6-7(5), 3-6, 6-1, 7-6(4), 7-5 comeback and raised his arms to the crowd in defiance when it was over.
The two incidents exemplify a problem with the rules about cramping. While a medical evaluation is conducted to distinguish between muscle injuries and cramps, the decision between proper treatment and some largely ineffective massaging is based on a test of belief. This makes it almost impossible to have any consistency and leads to confusion among players and fans when it comes up.
After receiving the treatment in the third set, Atmane resorted to hitting underarm serves. Not the soft, disguised spinny kind that players use as a sneak attack, but regular forehands. The cramp spread to his other leg and then to his left hand. He even hit two forehand-serves with his right hand.
After serving, he tried just about every possible tactic — hitting hyper-aggressive shots, hitting 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 and hit sadistic drop shots of his own with Atmane barely able to take a step.
From 1-0, 40-40, Atmane won six points as Munar took the third set 6-1. By the last two games, Atmane was on the edge of tanking (when players deliberately lose either to conserve energy or out of self-annoyance), but he did not receive a best-effort warning. He did receive 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.
A funny situation ensued in which neither player seemed to know what the rules regarding the difference between loss of serve and a code violation for delaying a game were.
Between the third and fourth sets, Munar told the chair umpire that he was hyper-focused on Atmane being warned correctly, because he had lost to Diego Schwartzman, who Munar said was “cramping like hell” at the tournament in 2018. Eight years is a long time for a cramp-loss trauma to linger in the mind.
Atmane tried to serve normally to start the fourth set, but could not do it reliably. At 15-40, Munar then approached the chair umpire again to complain about Atmane having a two-way conversation with his team for what he said was the third time. “I just want you to apply the rules,” he told the chair umpire, who said he had not seen anything out of line during the match to that point.
Coaches can give short phrases or tips, but full two-way conversations are not permitted during regular play.
During Munar and the umpire’s discussion, Atmane stood by his team and talked. The supervisor told them to not have a two-way conversation.
Munar’s pausing proceedings appeared to give Atmane the chance to recover, and he played with renewed vigor, but Munar still broke serve to lead the fourth set 1-0. Atmane then received a point penalty for delaying the next game, and Munar cruised to another hold of serve.
But Atmane’s rehydration treatments started to work, and he broke back to get to 3-3, before saving a break point in the seventh game to grab the lead. The match started to feel at least somewhat like a normal one again, and the fourth set went to a tiebreak, which Munar won to send the match the distance. Ultimately, that was a set too far for Atmane.