Feliciano Lopez played his last match of his professional career at the Mallorca Championships. He lost to Hanfmann on grass, the surface on which he has achieved some of his best successes.. He played his last doubles match with Stefanos Tsitsipas as a partner, against Mexican Santiago Gonzalez and Frenchman Edouard Roger-Vasselin, who won by a double 6-4 on the Grandstand court of the Mallorca Country Club.
After the match, a Feliciano who could not hold back his tears, surrounded by his wife and with his son in his arms, received a tribute from the public accompanied by a video dedicated by Rafael Nadal in which he praised his career, congratulated him for what he had achieved and wished him all kinds of luck in the new stage of his career.
Feliciano then took the microphone. Among other things, he said “I have tried to see tennis as a show, to make the people who follow tennis happy. I hope I have succeeded”. He thanked “all the coaches I’ve had, each one is part of my story. My family too. My father was the ‘madman’ who started all this. He put a racket in my hand and life has brought me this far. I want to thank him for that. And finally, to the two people who are with me – his wife, Sandra Gago, and his son Darío. Our stage has been the last but the most beautiful. We still have our lives ahead of us”.
Feliciano will not be far away from tennis. He will continue as director of the Mutua Madrid Open and will also, from this season, take over the direction of the Davis Cup finals.
Feli López bids farewell with seven singles titles: Vienna 2004, Johannesburg 2010, Eastbourne 2013 and 2014, Gstaad 2016 and Queen’s in 2017 and 2019. Also with six doubles titles, the most important of them the one he captured at Roland Garros 2016 along with Marc López (the rest are Stockholm 2004, Doha 2016, Barcelona 2018, Queen’s 2019 and Acapulco 2022), and 11 other finals, including the US Open 2017 with the same partner. He has a record of 260 wins and was world number 9 in November 2016, as well as winning five Davis Cups as a doubles player.
