Nîmes club hosts stacked men’s and women’s P1000 weekend

HDN Padel Club turned its eight outdoor courts into a full weekend stage, with men’s and women’s P1000s running in parallel from July 3 to 5 and a P500 added for players knocked out on Saturday. In Nîmes, that meant three straight days of competition, qualifications on Friday, main draws on Saturday and semifinals and finals on Sunday, all built to keep the club busy well into the evening.

The men’s draw carried the sharpest edge in the domestic field. Paul Forichon and Ludovic Cancel entered as the top seeds with a combined ranking of 70, while Nicolas Molinero and Yoan Boronad sat at No. 2, Pedro Diaz Torregrosa and Louis Jover at No. 3, and Timéo Fonteny and Tom Taieb at No. 4. Boronad, ranked sixth in France, and Fonteny, fourth in France, gave the bracket extra weight because both have been moving quickly through the national picture and arrived in Nîmes with momentum behind them.

That depth extended beyond the seeded pairs. Alexandre Toppin and Quentin Ayuso were viewed as a dangerous spoiler team, while Pierre and Lucien Samitier, Valentin Pasquier and Evan Armand, and Romain Vial and Benjamin Tullou all sat in the group capable of exploiting a loose section of the draw. The entry list underlined how compressed the level was at the top: Forichon was 38th in France, Cancel 32nd, Molinero 65th, Diaz Torregrosa 49th, Jover 72nd and Taieb 140th, a spread that still left room for a surprise run if one of the bigger names slipped.

The women’s tournament was just as crowded at the top, with Bougon and Gontier seeded No. 1 ahead of Lienard and Sorel, Verdier and Berthéas, and Lachasseigne and Mouis. With both draws stacked at once, HDN did not offer a standard weekend bracket so much as a concentrated festival of matches, the kind that forces quality into every round and leaves little margin for anyone hoping to cruise.

The setting helped explain why the club could carry it. HDN has been established at 620 chemin des Hauts de Nîmes since 2017, and this format showed how far the venue has pushed itself as a summer stop in the Gard and the south of France. Fonteny’s recent rise after his FIP Bronze Ljubljana win and Boronad’s climb to 195th in the FIP world rankings only added to the pull, giving Nîmes a domestic event with players arriving in form and a schedule crowded enough to feel like one major weekend rather than two separate tournaments.