Frances Tiafoe says the racquet that he lost when celebrating his French Open second-round win with the crowd has been returned to him.<\/p>\n
American 19th seed Tiafoe battled for four hours and 43 minutes in sweltering heat in Paris to beat Poland’s Hubert Hurkacz 6-7 (5-7) 7-6 (7-5) 6-4 6-7 (1-7) 6-4.<\/p>\n
Immediately after securing victory, Tiafoe ran over to a group of fans in the stands and embraced them in celebration while still holding his racquet.<\/p>\n
Tiafoe jumped up and down with the group before breaking free to return to his seat – but the racquet was no longer in his hand.<\/p>\n
“They were locking me in. I thought I was going to fall into the crowd at one point,” Tiafoe said.<\/p>\n
“It was fun, it was a cool moment – but I actually need that racquet.”<\/p>\n
Tiafoe said he let go of the racquet when his arm was “getting stuck” during the celebrations, and only realised it was missing when he walked back on court.<\/p>\n
“I need to go shake Hubi’s [Hurkacz’s] hand and the ref’s hand. And then I’m walking off the court and I was like ‘wait, hold on, I’m down a racquet’,” Tiafoe said.<\/p>\n
“I never put that racquet back in.”<\/p>\n
After offering a reward on Instagram of two tickets to his next match, Tiafoe said it has been returned to his coach.<\/p>\n
Tiafoe, 28, is aiming to go further than his quarter-final finish at Roland Garros last year.<\/p>\n
He will play Portugal’s unseeded Jaime Faria in the third round after his 7-5 7-6 (7-1) 6-2 victory over Germany’s Jan-Lennard Struff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Frances Tiafoe says the racquet that he lost when celebrating his French Open second-round win with the crowd…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-671720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}