The UK’s Arthur Fery grew up only five minutes away from Wimbledon’s All England Club. On July 8, he beat Italian ninth seed Flavio Cobolli in straight sets to make the semifinals as a wild card ranked 114 in the world.
The 23-year-old fell to the ground after he served an ace to cap off the decisive victory, in which he didn’t drop a single game in the third set.
“That last game I felt emotions that I hadn’t experienced before in my life,” Fery said in the postmatch interview. “I just can’t believe it. It’s incredible playing on Center Court for the second time.”
Fery was born in France but moved to Wimbledon, England, when he was very young and represents Great Britain.
When asked if Fery gets a sense of his Cinderella run’s significance, he said, “I’m starting to ... it’s only going to grow match after match that I win.”
Fery beat Cobolli in their one previous matchup, a straight-set win in this year’s Australian Open, though Cobolli said he was sick during the match. Fery said winning against the Italian before gave him a boost of confidence heading into Wednesday’s matchup.
“I’ve always believed in myself and believed that I could ... be a top player in the world. ... But a semifinalist in Wimbledon is something else,” he said in the press conference.
Fery’s path here was anything but smooth, having to come back from down two sets to one and win a deciding fifth-set super tiebreak in both of his last two matches against Zizou Bergs and Grigor Dimitrov.
In the quarterfinals, when Dimitrov missed his backhand into the net, and Fery won the super tiebreak 10–7, he dropped his racket and threw his hands up in disbelief.
“We’ve got probably the greatest of all time watching in the front row over there,” Fery said in the postmatch interview, acknowledging eight-time Wimbledon champion Roger Federer in the stands. “And now playing here in front of all you guys, having the support and winning, it’s unbelievable.”
The Stanford graduate is just the second wild card to ever make the Wimbledon semis, the other being Goran Ivanisevic in 2001, who went on to win the tournament.
Unlike Ivanisevic, who had played in three previous Wimbledon finals before his incredible run, Fery was virtually unknown prior to this win streak.
Fery had never made it past the second round of a major or ATP 1000 tournament before, and still hasn’t played in most of them.
His run has drawn comparison to fellow Brit Emma Raducanu’s run at the 2021 U.S. Open, when she won the tournament without dropping a set at just 18 years old and as a qualifier.
When she and fellow countryman Jack Draper pulled out of this year’s Wimbledon due to injuries, there was little hope one of Britain’s own could make a deep run.
The last time a British man won the tournament was in 2016, when Andy Murray won.
In the semifinals, Fery will face second-seed German Alexander Zverev, who is also playing in his first Wimbledon semifinal, but is coming off his first Grand Slam title in June at the French Open.
