Lois Boisson will soon be back at Roland-Garros, the scene of her breakthrough last year—but is stuck in a wheel of fitness uncertainty.

“I need to feel confident about my body again.” That’s what Boisson told me last month when we chatted for the first time since last November, and it gave us both whiplash. It was like being back in 2025, before her surprise run to the Roland-Garros semifinals, at just her fourth event following nearly a year out of the game after tearing her left ACL.

When we parted in November, Boisson, freshly minted in the top 40, was all smiles when talking about being impatient to discover all the biggest tournaments she’d never entered, even picturing herself in Melbourne “playing tennis under the sun, the dream…” How is it that it’s more than six months later and she’s barely played since? Boisson’s career shows us again how a professional tennis player’s campaign can go from sky-high to rock-bottom in the blink of an eye. Players can make all the plans, but their bodies decide.

Boisson injured her right forearm and wrist this winter, not long after our chat, and what was initially thought to be a matter of a few weeks off took a turn for the worse. This month, she has played in Madrid, Rome, and Parma without notching a single win, still feeling some pain. She’s in a race against the clock to be in decent shape and confidence for Roland-Garros. Boisson saw a bit of light at the end of her tunnel, thanks to her first win of the year in Strasbourg, and then a solid match despite the loss to Victoria Mboko before making her way to Paris. It’s still a very tricky situation for Boisson, who became an instant phenomenon in France last year and signed some pretty big endorsement deals after her epic run. It’s a lot of unreasonable pressure on the 23-year-old’s shoulders, especially as she’s yet to complete a single full season on the WTA Tour. It makes no sense to expect her to reach the semis again this year, but Boisson is used to it all, as her journey has been unconventional, to say the least. 

Last year, Boisson had to crowdfund her season, but by season’s end she had made nearly a million dollars in prize money. Just like that, she went from top 300 to top 40, rich, and fabulous. The most searched French athlete on Google for the year. Unable to walk the streets without being stopped, which she doesn’t mind, saying people have been incredibly nice and respectful so far. And Boisson knows where she’s coming from. “When you don’t have money, as in the smaller events, you earn very little, you can’t know how long you’re going to be able to play. Now I’m calmer about it. It’s the same sport but not the same life. Even if it hasn’t changed my entire life, it has given me serenity. But I’ve kept my head cold through all this, really. Not acting like I was living a fairy tale, like it was something incredible. It was more from outside that things looked a bit crazy!” 

Boisson is discreet but highly ambitious. She never thinks about the next talk show or sponsor’s shoot, but about the next message to send her fitness trainer Sebastien Durand (formerly with Serena Williams and still with Grigor Dimitrov), always with the same goal: getting better to win bigger. 

Even now, as her year has been sabotaged, Boisson tries to keep her head above water. She’s been working with a psychologist since her knee injury and has also learned the hard way that for every high, there could be a few lows. Each time her career was about to match her obvious talent, something derailed her. At the end of 2021, she injured her shoulder so badly that it took her 10 months to recover. In 2024, close to the top 100 and with a wild card for Roland-Garros in the pocket, she tore that ACL. And so, in 2025, as she confirmed her French Open run with a title in Hamburg, she injured her left adductor and would carry that one like a burden until she called it a day in September 2025 after the China Open. But she was back in full health in the winter, ready to roar with that huge forehand and those backhand variations, and it’s the sad irony here, the power of her athletic abilities and mental strength. But again, her body declined.

Back to square one? “Last year, I was coming from much further in the rankings and wasn’t at all expected to do well. This time, I’ve achieved things, and I want to keep going, but my body is preventing me from doing so. Yet I still have a lot of confidence because I know what I can do.” She knows. We all know.

But that last setback hurt her deeply, despite how levelheaded she’s always been. “At some point, you’re a bit done with having to keep that head cold…” She couldn’t watch tennis during all the months she was stuck at home: It was too painful, and she was too angry. “I’m still living in uncertainty…. Things were handled poorly from the start, which complicated the injury. I struggled to cope with not being able to play all these events, and I wasn’t in the right mindset at all. To move forward, I first had to get my mind back on track. I feel way better now and wouldn’t be back out there if I didn’t think I could compete.”

I had to ask her the question we’ve so many times asked the likes of Bianca Andreescu or Juan Martin del Potro: Does she feel it’s all bad luck, or is there something under all this? “I don’t believe in bad luck. You can call it this if it happens once, but not five or six times. This winter, I searched for answers and set up many things to prevent injuries, but in the end, I injured myself again. I’m still wondering about the why of all this.”

Boisson’s young career has been a succession of fights—against her temper, against her body—and so it feels like she’s been battling out there for ages, despite the fact that she’s only just begun her career. “Uncertainty” is the word that came back the most when we were chatting, like a curse, as every top player has this word on their blacklist. They need to plan, they need to know what’s next, and they need to be on the move toward their goals. “Honestly, tearing my ACL was maybe easier than what I went through this year. With the ACL, you know you’re out for nine months or so. There’s a clear path. Here…” Uncertainty was not the plan, but here Boisson still is, both giving hope to every player who has suffered a potentially career-ending injury and reminding the rest of the field that there are no guarantees.