Marco Trungelliti has finally been revealed as Bernard Tomic’s first-round opponent at the French Open – 21 minutes before the Australian takes to the court.
The Argentine made a desperate 10-hour car ride from Barcelona to Paris to beat the sign-on deadline for “lucky losers”.
Kyrgios’s 11th-hour withdrawal on Sunday with a lingering elbow issue left officials in a mad scramble to find a replacement.
In unprecedented and rather comical scenes at Roland Garros, the tournament ran out of lucky losers – players who failed to qualify – available to fill the void in the main draw.
A glut of withdrawals left seven lucky losers already promoted to the 128-man main event, with Egyptian Mohamed Safwat the only unsuccessful qualifying entrant to sign up on Sunday.
Bulgarian fourth seed Grigor Dimitrov only learnt he was playing Safwat 20 minutes before taking to Court Philippe Chatrier and beating the first Egyptian man to make a grand slam main draw in 22 years 6-1 6-4 7-6 (7-1) to safely progress to the second round.
Finding an opponent for Tomic proved far more troublesome for the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and French governing body.
Prajnesh Gunneswaran would have been next in line but was ruled out of the race for the eighth lucky loser spot because he was already in the main draw of another tournament this week, a Challenger event in Italy.
It then emerged Gunneswaran could actually take the lucky loser’s spot if granted a release by the tournament supervisor in Vicenza.
Alas for the Indian battler, Gunneswaran had also already departed Paris.
Trungelliti emerged on Sunday night as the player likely to take on Tomic – and collect half of Kyrgios’s first-round prize money – a cool 40,000 euros ($A62,000) – or more if he won.
Nothing was certain, though, until Trungelliti arrived at at last at Roland Garros on Monday morning in time.
Trungelliti had posted a series of photos on social media as he was making the journey back to Paris with several mates.
He had until 30 minutes before Tomic’s scheduled match at 11am local time (7pm AEST) to sign up.
The winner will meet either Romanian Marius Copil or Italian Marco Cecchinato for a place in the third round.
The spate of withdrawals stems from a new rule introduced this year by the ITF to combat injured players retiring mid-match in the first round of the slams and then collecting their cheques.
Now, players who do not “perform to the required professional standard” in the first round, including by retiring, also risk being fined their prize money.
Ironically, Tomic was fined a third of his STG35,000 ($61,700) prize money for unsportsmanlike conduct last year at Wimbledon, after saying he felt “bored” and “couldn’t care less” following a straight-sets defeat on day one.
Any repeat this year and he would lose the lot.