A year ago, Jack Draper was the player everyone on tour had to be careful of, a rangy left-hander with a booming serve who had just climbed to world No. 4 and won Indian Wells. This week in Montreal, the picture looked nothing like that. He was simply trying to survive one match, and even that proved too much.

Draper returned to the tour at the Canadian Open against France’s Terence Atmane, his first Masters 1000 event since Eastbourne in June and just his sixth tournament of the entire year. He had withdrawn from Wimbledon, then from last week’s Washington Open when the same arm flared up again. After dropping the opening set, he fought back to take the second 6-2, showing real flashes of his old level. Then in the decider, his serve speed dropped noticeably, and by the time he was broken again, Atmane had built a 4-1 lead.

Draper sat down at the changeover and broke down in tears, hunched over and unable to compose himself as the cameras stayed on him. Commentator Rob Faulds captured the moment as it happened.

“It’s been a trying year for Jack Draper, and all you have to do is look at his face,” Faulds said. “The pain, whether it’s physical, emotional, or a combination of the two, is starting to leak out now. An emotional Jack Draper sitting down between games five and six, as he finds himself on the short end.”

Former British No. 1 Annabel Croft added her own read on the moment.

“This is pretty emotional. He’s bent over and literally erupting with emotion here,” Croft said. “It’s very, very upsetting to see. I can only assume that the arm is hurting. He couldn’t hold it in and he let it all out.”

Surprisingly, Draper did not call for a physio or retire mid-match. He continued competing through physical pain and even managed to score a full power forehand winner on Atmane’s first match point. At the end, the Frenchman closed out the game with a 6-3, 2-6, 6-2 win on a second-serve ace. The result, though, felt almost secondary to what it revealed about where Draper’s body currently stands.

The injury tracing all of this back is a chronic bone bruise in his left arm, originally diagnosed as a bruised humerus, that first surfaced during last year’s US Open. Draper withdrew from that tournament as the No. 5 seed, becoming the first men’s top-five seed ever to pull out mid-tournament at the US Open in the Open era, and shut down the rest of his 2025 season because of it.

The same injury then cost him all three Grand Slams in 2026: the Australian Open, Roland-Garros, and Wimbledon. He’s managed occasional bright spots since, a quarterfinal run at Indian Wells and a semifinal at Eastbourne, but nothing close to consistent court time. Andy Murray joined his coaching team back in May, and Montreal was only the second event the two have actually worked together, a reflection of just how little healthy tennis Draper has been able to play all year.

Andy Murray joined his coaching team back in May, but Montreal marked only the second event the pair have actually worked together in, a reflection of just how little healthy court time Draper has had available to him all year.

That scarcity of matches is exactly what makes his next few weeks so uncertain.

US Open participation and mixed doubles both hang in the balance

Draper has missed every Grand Slam this season because of the arm. He holds a wildcard into next week’s Cincinnati Open, but Tuesday’s collapse makes his availability there genuinely uncertain, and it’s reopened real doubt about whether he’ll be fit enough to play the US Open at all.

His planned mixed doubles reunion with Jessica Pegula is caught in the same uncertainty. She’d just arrived in Toronto off a runner-up finish in Washington when word of Draper’s tearful exit reached her. The two paired up almost by accident last year after Draper’s original partner withdrew, then went on to reach the US Open semifinals together, beating Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu along the way, a run good enough that they planned to team up again this year.

Pegula didn’t hide her concern when asked about it.

“I know that he’s been really struggling a bit with some injuries, and I saw today he had a really tough day with his match,” Pegula said. “I don’t know if we’re going to, we’re supposed to play. Obviously I know he’s not healthy, so we’ll see how that goes.”

This isn’t the first time the mental weight of the injury cycle has visibly gotten to Draper either. During an earlier retirement at the 2023 French Open, he admitted feeling “mentally destroyed” by the pattern of setbacks, saying at the time it was “tougher than playing and losing almost.”

In Montreal, the 24-year-old was carrying that same weight again, trying to rebuild a comeback from scratch three years and one career-high ranking later. Whether that rebuild continues in Cincinnati next week, or gets pushed back even further toward the US Open, now depends entirely on how his arm responds in the coming days.