Terence Atmane gave Jannik Sinner a Pokémon card as a birthday present
Before the two took to the court for their Cincinnati semifinal, the Frenchman gave Sinner a Pikachu card in honor of his 24th birthday.
Gotta catch 'em all! Jannik Sinner celebrated his 24th birthday not just with cake and a semifinal victory at the Cincinnati Open on Saturday, but with a special present from his beaten opponent Terence Atmane. The Frenchman, who boasts the most impressive Pokémon card collection in the ATP locker room, gifted one of them to the world No. 1 ahead of their match.
Backstage cameras at the Lindner Family Tennis Center captured the candid moment before the two walked out onto P&G Stadium Court, leading to Tennis Channel's Prakash Amritraj to dub the left-hander "exceptional."
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With upset wins over three seeds, including No. 4 Taylor Fritz and No. 7 Holger Rune, as well as Joao Fonseca as a qualifier in Cincinnati, Atmane grabbed headlines with his play on the court this week, but his passion for collecting Pokémon cards got him in the news before.
Two years ago, he opened up to the ATP about his expansive hobby, which began in 2007 when he was 15 and resumed in earnest in 2019, saying that some of the rarest cards took him two years to find.
“When I was a little kid, I was watching Pokémon on TV. It came pretty naturally, at school and everything, people were talking about these Pokémon cards and it was pretty famous in the world at that time,” Atmane told the ATP website in 2023, an interview that resurfaced this week in the middle of his Cincinnati star turn. “I remember I was playing with my friends in school and then somehow I started collecting this when I was a little boy. And this little boy still has his collection from that time."
While Sinner's devotion to the smash-hit Japanese series is much more casual—he admitted to playing the mobile game Pokémon Go for only "two or three days" when he visited the Tennis Channel desk after the match—he was nonetheless grateful for the gift.
"I’m very lucky that I got one of his ones,” Sinner said, revealing that the card featured the world-famous Pikachu character. “It was just a nice moment before a match, we didn’t know each other at all. So, it was a nice moment.”
As it later turned out, it was one that the Frenchman had been planning.
"I had to give him a little something," Atmane confessed after the match. "I was thinking last night about what should I give to him. ... I was like, OK, why not give him just a Pokemon card? It's like, it's just me. I'm Pokemon card collector. I think this is like the perfect gift.
"If that was my birthday, I will be so happy that someone [gave me] a Pokemon card. So I was like, OK, why not just [give to] him, like a very nice Pokemon card?"