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Although not an official announcement in the traditional sense of the word, the tennis world shook a bit when Brazilian Joao Lucas Reis da Silva shared a series of photos of himself and partner Gui Sampaio Ricardo, an actor and model, on Instagram almost a year ago.
While these kinds of “revelations” hardly raise an eyebrow on the women’s tour these days, no active professional player has been officially gay since.
The fact that Reis da Silva was outside the top 400 at the time almost seemed immaterial. 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, 21-year-old Swiss Mika Brunold made an announcement herself.
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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 has competed on the Challenger Tour all season and has dropped around 100 places from his rankings in 2025 after ranking at No. 568 in early 2024.
As a junior, he was a top-50 player who reached the main draw of both Roland Garros and Wimbledon juniors in 2022, his last junior year.
In Paris he defeated American Nishesh Basavareddy – who peeked into the top 100 last summer and finished in fifth place in the first round.
It’s unbelievable how much thought, fear, courage and hesitation went into the decision to let the tennis world know about this.
The response to his Instagram post was overwhelmingly positive.
But it remains disheartening to realize that as 2025 draws to a close, this is STILL a thing and STILL a big problem.
Brunold must feel free already. A post on Saturday, with a group of friends he no doubt leaned on as he weighed the decision, is already a good sign that he will have a support system available if he needs it.
Hopefully he doesn’t need it. And he will have a new group of supporters cheering him on.
In the meantime, Reis Da Silva has seen nothing but good things since he told his own truth.
In February, ranked No. 417, he made his ATP Tour-level debut in qualifying for the ATP 500 in Rio, losing in three sets in the first round to No. 125 seed Chun-Hsin Tseng. Coincidentally, Tseng was the player who beat him all the way back in 2018, when he reached the third round at Roland Garros juniors.
Two weeks ago he jumped to the top 200 for the first time in his career.
He won his first Challenger title in Argentina in June, without dropping a set. It came two weeks after winning his first title at ITF M25 level – his first title of any kind since 2020.
And in August he made his Grand Slam debut in qualifying at the US Open.
He faced Alexander Blockx – a twenty-year-old Belgian who had a faster path to get there.
Reis Da Silva reached the top 30 as a junior and played at Roland Garros and Wimbledon. But he spent most of his junior career in South America. And he wasn’t a kid you heard much about at the time. It took him seven years to get into the top 200.
Blockx and came within the confines of the top 100 a few weeks ago. He won the 2023 Australian Open juniors, beating the hugely hyped Joao Fonseca EN Learner Tien along the way, and became the number 1 junior in the world in May 2023. He played in Grand Slam qualifying for the fifth time.
It went pretty quickly, to Blockx’s advantage. But the ice has been broken and hopefully we will 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 quite nervous.
Earlier this month, Reis da Silva reached the final of a Challenger in Peru, entering the top 200 for the first time.
It’s hard to say whether the unfathomable daily pressure from his back has contributed to Reis da Silva’s blossoming as a player.
Sure, he had the bona fides as a junior to make you think he still shouldn’t 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 boys will look at these two and see that making that scary leap has only led to good things.
And – again, hopefully – we will see these two, and others, regularly at ATP Tour level. And it will no longer be newsworthy.
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