For the latest UNIQLO interview we spoke to Belgium's Joachim Gerard about the highs and lows of his 2019 season, which culminated in his fourth NEC Wheelchair Singles Masters title in five years.

The life of an athlete involves many ups and downs. For Joachim Gerard, recent seasons on the UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Tour have brought the full range of experiences and emotions.

In 2019 Gerard had to contend with saying goodbye to his long-time friend, coach and mentor Marc Grandjean. But as the season continued there was also the high of Grand Slam victories and then a fourth title in five years at the year-end NEC Wheelchair Singles Masters.

“We started to work together in 2006 and it was a good time for him to arrive in my life,” says Gerard as he recalls his partnership with former ITF Wheelchair Tennis Coach of the Year Grandjean. “It was more than just tennis, he became like a dad to me.”

Grandjean died in February, aged 62, having been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition towards the end of 2017.

“It was very hard to learn about his illness, first of all, and then when he passed away, after 13 years together, it was heart-breaking,” said Gerard. “For quite a while I was not ready to play. My head was not on the court, but somewhere else and I could not keep my focus. It took me a few months to accept it, but I learned to keep all the good things from him in my heart and in my head and then I could move forward.”

Prior to Gerard and Grandjean’s introduction in 2006, it was Gerard’s own dad who had been largely responsible for helping to kick start his son’s wheelchair tennis career.

“At 12 years old I had to have surgery on my right leg due to polio. Before that I was walking every day but after the surgery I was in a wheelchair for a few months. I had always been a sporty guy so my dad decided we needed to find a sport I could play in a wheelchair,” he said. “To start with it was a hobby and my main sport was swimming, but I liked tennis so much that I kept playing more and more.”

“Tennis has helped me to show that even if I’ve got something wrong with my body I can still do something as great as any ATP player. Every day I’ll have someone telling me I’m courageous. I’ll say ‘no, I’m not, I’m just doing something that I like and it’s helping me to be somebody’.”

“It’s unbelievable how a racket, a court and a few balls can make a difference. It’s my job and it’s doing everything for me. I’m known in Belgium as ‘Joachim Gerard the wheelchair tennis player’ and that’s amazing. I would wish the same for anybody that, like me, they can make a living from what started as a hobby. For me it’s tennis.”

As Grandjean’s illness progressed, Gerard had to start looking for other coaches to work with. He now feels settled with Damien Martinquet, his coach for much of the second half of 2019.

“I needed to change my coach, because there was some difference with the coach I had been working with and, personally, I felt it was not the best for me,” said former world No. 1 Gerard, who finished 2019 ranked No. 5 in the world. “I had known Damien for two years as he had been working at the club where I played. Anyway, after I’d been looking for a new coach for two or three months Damien’s contract came to an end, so we made a proposal to him to start working with me and I think it’s a really good partnership.”

“I don’t think we’ve made many changes. We made a few changes before the US Open and then before the Masters and I can be more solid now and more functional because of those things,” he added.

Gerard’s current working relationship with Martinquet is one that the 31-year-old Rio Paralympic men’s singles bronze medallist hopes will help him scale the kind of heights he reached in 2016 alongside Grandjean, when becoming men’s singles world No. 1 for the first time just a few months after winning Belgium’s first ever Paralympic wheelchair tennis medal.

It’s certainly a relationship that enjoyed a spectacular end to the 2019 UNIQLO Wheelchair Tennis Tour as Gerard earned his first singles title of the season with victory over Alfie Hewett in the final of the NEC Masters in Orlando. Only Hewett’s victory over Gerard in their 2017 Masters semi-final has interrupted what could possibly have been a sequence of five Masters titles since 2015.

“The Masters is just a tournament for me, like any other, and it’s as important as a Grand Slam. I just try to give my best from the beginning until the end and it pays off for me,” insists Gerard. “The only difference for me is that when I won the Masters the first time in 2015 [beating Shingo Kunieda in both the round-robin and then in the final] I made an unbelievable and exceptional tournament and that helped me to put it up there with the Grand Slams.”

“So maybe now when I go to the Masters I feel more free. I just want to do my best, whether it’s the Masters, a Grand Slam, a Super Series or another ITF tournament.”

Gerard’s comparison between the Masters and the Grand Slams has its own significance. While winning the year-end championship for four of the last five years, he has yet to win a Grand Slam singles title.

In doubles, it’s a different story. Gerard and regular doubles partner Stefan Olsson began 2019 by winning their first Grand Slam doubles title together at the Australian Open and followed up with victory at Wimbledon. Their partnership has also seen them finish runners-up in the UNIQLO Wheelchair Doubles Masters for the last two years.

As Gerard approaches another Australian Open in January, it’s coming up to four years since he reached his one and only Grand Slam singles final to date, finishing runner-up to eventual Rio Paralympic champion Gordon Reid at Melbourne Park.

Should 2020 see Gerard go on and be able to do the same as Reid did in 2016 and win his first Grand Slam singles title before earning gold in the Paralympics, for now he is merely looking to improve on the last 12 months.

“Firstly, for next year I just want to do better than than this year, I’ve been waiting for my second Grand Slam final for nearly four years now. I would like to get back to another Grand Slam final and then play my game and see what happens,” he said. “I know I’m capable of it, but I just need to keep working and do it not just in the Grand Slams, but in every tournament.

“For sure I’m looking forward to Tokyo 2020 and, of course, I would like to do better than my bronze in Rio. There are only two colours better than that and I will fight from the beginning to the end. I just want to give everything I have, from the first week of the year through to the end. If I was asked to choose, I wouldn’t wish for either a Grand Slam title or a Paralympic gold above the other I’m going to try my best to win both of them. I will give everything.”

Whilst looking forward to ‘giving everything’ for the coming season, Gerard has seen a number of evolutions of the sport since becoming Cruyff Foundation Junior Masters champion in 2005.

“I think in years gone by, if you wanted to win a tournament you had to be smarter than your opponent. Players like Robin Ammerlaan and David Hall, they were different,” he said. “Now you have to be strong, you have to be fast, you have to be smart and you have to have great technique. You have to be a very complete player. I think now we are more offensive, more like the able-bodied players.

I think the top seven or top eight We are all very good players and very competitive together,” said Gerard as he considers his current peers at the top of the men’s game. “There are two players, in particular that are on top of the others – maybe three, with Alfie (Hewett), but he has not been playing as many tournaments as the others.

“I think this year Gustavo (Fernandez) and Shingo (Kunieda) showed us that they were really consistent and never got much less than a semi-final. Yes, anyone can beat anyone, but more often than not it’s been the same two at the top of the tournaments this year.

As a new season approaches, Gerard appreciates how far wheelchair tennis has come since he first started out as a 12-year-old and also sees the great potential that lies head – whether that be for himself as an individual player or for his sport.

“First of all I think we are really lucky that we have a sport that we can play at the same time as the abled-bodied players, like at the Grand Slams. But there is always more we can do,” he insists.

“It would be nice to be more recognised for what we do. It’s getting better and better every year, but there’s always some improvement that the ITF and wheelchair tennis can make. We have to be patient, but hopefully one day our UNIQLO Tour will be as big as the ATP or WTA.”