"I LOVE THE CLAY! I LOVE IT HERE! I CAN'T GET ENOUGH!"
Alex de Minaur gazed up to his player's box and bellowed out his new-found passion for the city where he swore it was always raining, and the heavy clay courts where he wasn't supposed to have a chance.
And the first thing he thought about after knocking out Daniil Medvedev for the best win of his grand slam career was how on earth was he going to face his back-up team who he'd been moaning at for years, telling them he couldn't play on the red stuff.
"Now it looks like it's one of my best slam results. Looks like I've converted myself into a clay specialist!" beamed the 25-year-old, who is now in only the second grand slam quarter-final of his career.
"The toughest thing is dealing with my team, because obviously they've got bragging rights, and they give me a lot of slack for me complaining all these years about my level on the clay!"
Despite his protestations, though, this was a breakthrough that might have been coming.
True, de Minaur had never before got past the second round of the clay-court slam in seven attempts before this year, but the more he has played on the surface, the more comfortable, patient, efficient - and attacking - he has got.
In 2022, he reached the semi-finals of the Barcelona Open and gave Carlos Alcaraz a rare old scare, in 2023 he made the Barcelona quarters again and this season, he reached the Monte Carlo quarter-finals and beat Rafael Nadal, again in Barcelona. Each year, there's been a discernible improvement.
Most of all, he believed, this was a victory for experience, for continually going to the well in grand slams - 27 now - and improving bit by bit each year.
"So much of grand slam tennis in my opinion is just experience, because ultimately you can put in all the work in the world -- and I believe I'm one to do so -- but it's how you conserve energy, how you use your energy in these long, gruelling five-set matches, that there's a lot to learn from.
"And it's not just the fact that you play a gruelling match, it's about how you then bounce back for the next round. That's probably what my body has now started to get used to," added the 25-year-old, who took two hours 49 minutes to subdue Medvedev.
"Mentally I was very calm today. I knew that there was a good chance that we could even go into a fifth set, so I was ready for anything.
What has surprised him most is that he hasn't even had the conditions in Paris that might best suit him. Yes, the sunshine showed its face on Monday, but the courts were still nowhere near their fastest after the pounding from the rain they'd taken the previous week.
