Top seeds dominate French Guiana padel championship at City Five
Top seeds delivered in both finals at City Five, with Dimitri Contout and Jonathan Magnan holding off Mattys Bellony and Dylan De Nays Candau 7-6, 6-4 to claim the men’s crown and Maëva Waucquier and Charline Dardaud beating Sandrine Paul and Adalgisa De León de Dios 6-1, 7-6 for the women’s title. The French Guiana Tennis League staged the championship in Macouria, and the scale was hard to miss: 33 men’s pairs and 10 women’s pairs entered the draw, with local coverage saying more than 200 players gathered at the club on Sunday, June 21.
The men’s final needed a tiebreak in the opening set before Contout and Magnan edged clear, a scoreline that reflected the depth of the field more than any single runaway result. Jonathan Garrido and Thomas Garrido finished third, giving the men’s podium a familiar local shape and showing how far the competition extended beyond the finalists. In the women’s draw, Waucquier and Dardaud had to finish the job in a tighter second set after taking control early, and Salomé Chong Sit and Marine Mercurio completed the podium in third. Both brackets rewarded the pairs that stayed composed when the pressure rose late.
The championship also underscored how central French Guiana has become to the French padel map. City Five was inaugurated on June 2, 2025, and it has quickly turned into one of the territory’s main padel hubs, hosting a P500 men’s event and a P250 women’s event on February 7-8, 2026 before this regional championship arrived in June. A P1000 French Guiana Championship was also scheduled for June 19-21, 2026, tied to the club’s first anniversary, a sign that the competitive ladder in the territory is widening rather than waiting on mainland France for validation.
That growth has also been linked to Marcos Pereira, the former World Padel Tour coach working in Macouria to raise the local level. With bigger fields, stronger seedings and finals that still forced the favorites to earn every point, the June championship showed French Guiana operating as a serious regional pillar inside the FFT structure, not as a side note to it.