Four Paris Finals, Zero Trophies — Chingotto Gets a Fifth Shot at the Major He Can’t Win
GOATIFYFederico Chingotto has spent five years proving that Roland-Garros is one of the places where his padel travels best. The problem is that Paris has also become the one place where being almost perfect has never been enough.
He is back in the Alpine Paris Major final again, this time alongside Alejandro Galán after a 7-5, 6-2 semifinal win over Martín Di Nenno and Paquito Navarro. That makes Chingotto a finalist in every men's edition of the Paris Major since the tournament began in 2022. On Sunday, the opponent waiting across the net is painfully familiar: Arturo Coello and Agustín Tapia, the pair that has beaten him in each of the last three Paris finals.
The fifth attempt is bigger than a neat piece of tournament history. Galán and Chingotto arrived in Paris only 470 points behind Coello and Tapia in the 2026 Race after winning Madrid P1. A Major title is worth 2,000 points, so the result on Philippe-Chatrier can materially reshape the fight to finish the year as the world's top pair. Chingotto is not simply trying to solve one stubborn tournament anymore. He is trying to turn the tournament that has repeatedly stopped him into the place that changes the season.
Five Paris finals, three partners and one missing trophy
The remarkable part of Chingotto's Paris record is not the four defeats. It is that the finals kept arriving even as the partnership around him changed. In 2022 he reached the title match with Juan Tello and pushed Juan Lebrón and Galán to three sets before losing 6-3, 4-6, 6-4. A year later, now playing with Paquito Navarro, he knocked out Lebrón and Galán in the semifinal and returned to the final, only for Coello and Tapia to win 7-6, 6-1.
Then Chingotto joined Galán and the rivalry became even more direct. Their first Paris final together in 2024 ended in a 6-2, 6-1 defeat to Coello and Tapia. The 2025 rematch produced the same champion, with the No. 1 pair winning 6-1, 6-4. Across those first four finals, Chingotto won only one set.
That statistic sounds brutal until it is placed next to the other one: five straight Paris finals with three different partners. Plenty of elite players have a venue where the conditions never quite click, where an early upset appears every year or where one bad matchup keeps them away from the weekend. Chingotto has had the opposite problem. He has repeatedly solved the entire draw and then found the hardest possible opponent waiting at the final step.
Galán adds another layer to the story because he has occupied both sides of Chingotto's Paris frustration. He won the inaugural Paris Major in 2022 with Lebrón by beating Chingotto and Tello. Now he is the partner trying to help Chingotto finish the job. For Galán, Paris already carries the memory of a title. For Chingotto, the place is a collection of nearly-there moments that gets stranger with every return to the final.
This year's route has also given the pair a different kind of confidence. Di Nenno and Navarro had just blown open the bracket by eliminating Franco Stupaczuk and Jon Sanz, yet Galán and Chingotto controlled their semifinal in straight sets. They did not need a long comeback or a chaotic deciding set to get through. They found the pressure points, closed the first set 7-5 and then accelerated through the second.
That matters because Sunday's final is unlikely to be decided by who can simply survive. Chingotto and Galán have seen Coello and Tapia too often for surprises to last long. The question is whether the No. 2 pair can sustain enough pressure to force the defending champions away from the patterns that have made Philippe-Chatrier feel like home.
Coello and Tapia turned Chingotto's Paris problem into a No. 1 race
Coello and Tapia have made the last three editions of this tournament look less like three separate events and more like one continuous reign. They won Paris in 2023, repeated in 2024 and did it again in 2025. Since they became a pair, they have not lost a match at Roland-Garros.
Their semifinal against Juan Lebrón and Leo Augsburger showed why the streak has lasted. The match was close enough to demand patience, but the defending champions still won 7-5, 6-3 in just over an hour. They protected their serve, waited for the important moments and finished the job without allowing the match to drift into the kind of high-variance fight that can turn a Major upside down.
Normally that would make Sunday's final another attempt to knock the dominant pair off their favorite stage. The 2026 Race changes the stakes. Coello and Tapia came to Paris only 470 points ahead after their quarterfinal loss in Madrid opened the door for Galán and Chingotto. The No. 2 pair walked through it and won the Madrid title, their seventh trophy of the season.
That Madrid result also continued a telling 2026 pattern: whenever Coello and Tapia have failed to reach a final, Galán and Chingotto have won the tournament. Paris asks the harder question. Can they take the title when the No. 1 pair is still there on the final day?
A Major makes the answer especially valuable. The champion receives 2,000 ranking points, while the runner-up takes significantly less. With the Race already compressed, the swing is large enough for the Paris final to change who controls the chase for year-end No. 1. That transforms every tactical choice into something larger. A break of serve is not just one game on blue turf; it can become part of an 800-point shift in the season-long race.
For Chingotto, the symbolism is even sharper. Coello and Tapia are not merely the current No. 1s. They are the pair that has authored three straight endings to his Paris run. If he finally lifts the trophy on Sunday, he will have done it by beating the exact opponents who made the drought feel like a pattern in the first place.
If Coello and Tapia win again, their Paris dominance becomes even harder to explain away as familiarity or favorable conditions. Four straight titles at one of the tour's biggest stages would be a statement about their ability to absorb every version of the challenger across multiple seasons. It would also give them a badly needed answer after the Madrid stumble.
That is what makes the fifth Chingotto final feel different from the four before it. In 2022, the story was whether he could win a new Major with Tello. In 2023, it was a new partnership with Navarro. In 2024 and 2025, it became whether the new Chingotto-Galán project could break Coello-Tapia's control. In 2026, all of those threads have merged: the old Paris history, the defining rivalry of the current tour and a live battle for the No. 1 position.
Chingotto already knows how to reach the last Sunday in Paris. He has done it with Tello, Navarro and now three times with Galán. What he has never done is leave that Sunday holding the trophy. One more win would end the strangest unfinished chapter in his record and, at the same time, make the rest of the 2026 season far less comfortable for the pair that has ruled Paris for three years.
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