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While it wasn’t an official announcement in the traditional sense, the tennis world shook a little bit when Brazilian Joao Lucas Reis da Silva shared a series of photos of himself and partner Gui Sampaio Ricardo, an actor and model, nearly a year ago on Instagram.
While these types of “reveals” barely raise an eyebrow these days on the women’s tour, there had been no active professional player officially out as a gay man since … well, ever.
That Reis da Silva was ranked outside the top 400 at the time almost didn’t seem to matter. A barrier had been broken, better late than never.
But it took almost exactly a year for another player to follow suit.
Until this weekend, when 21-year-old Swiss Mika Brunold had an announcement of his own.
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The lanky Swiss, who turned 21 in October, is currently ranked No. 307, just off a career high of No. 289 reached in August.
He’s been on the Challenger Tour all season, lopping about 100 spots off his ranking in 2025 after beginning 2024 ranked No. 568.
As a junior, he was a top-50 player who made it to the main draw of both the Roland Garros and Wimbledon juniors in 2022, his final junior year.
In Paris, he defeated American Nishesh Basavareddy – who peeked into the top 100 this past summer and was the No. 5 seed, in the first round.
There’s no way to fathom how much thought, fear, courage and hesitation went into the decision to let the tennis world know.
The comments on his Instagram post were overwhelmingly positive.
But it remains disheartening to realize that as 2025 comes to a close, this is STILL a thing and it’s STILL a big deal.
Already, Brunold must feel free. A post on Saturday, with a group of pals he no doubt leaned on as he weighed the decision, is already a great sign that he’ll have a support system on call if he needs it.
Hopefully, he won’t need it. And he’ll have a new group of supporters cheering him on.
In the meantime, Reis Da Silva had has nothing but good things happen since telling his own truth.
In February, ranked No. 417, he made his ATP Tour-level debut in the qualifying at the ATP 500 in Rio, losing in three sets in the first round to Chun-Hsin Tseng, ranked No. 125. As it happened, Tseng was the player who defeated him all the way back in 2018, when he made the third round at the Roland Garros juniors.
Two weeks ago, he leaped into the top 200 for the first time in his career.
He won his first Challenger title in June in Argentina, without dropping a set. It came two weeks after winning his first title at the ITF M25 level – his first title of any kind since 2020.
And in August, he made his Grand Slam debut in the qualifying at the US Open.
He faced Alexander Blockx – a 20-year-old Belgian who had a rather more expedited path to get there.
Reis Da Silva reached the top 30 as a junior, and played at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. But most of his junior career was spent in South America. And he wasn’t a kid you heard about much at the time. It took him seven years to get into the top 200.
Blockx and got within whiskers of the top 100 just a few weeks ago. He won the 2023 Australian Open juniors, beating the hugely-hyped Joao Fonseca AND Learner Tien en route, and became the No. 1 junior in the world in May, 2023. He was playing in Grand Slam qualifying for the fifth time.
It was pretty quick, in Blockx’s favour. But the ice is broken and hopefully we’ll see him at the Australian Open.
Here’s what it looked like. We saw a guy with great wheels and great skills, but who was pretty nervous.
Earlier this month, Reis da Silva made the final of a Challenger in Peru, which brought him into the top 200 for the first time.
It’s hard to know whether having that unfathomable daily pressure off his back contributed to Reis da Silva’s blossoming as a player.
Certainly he had the bona fides as a junior to make you think it he shouldn’t still have been outside the top 400 at age 24.
Hopefully Brunold will have the same experience, as he looks to take the next step in 2026.
And – hopefully – other young guys out there will look at these two and see that making that scary leap has only led to good things.
And – again, hopefully – we’ll see those two, and others, at the ATP Tour level on a regular basis. And it won’t be newsworthy any more.
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