Raphael Collignon returned to the courts on Wednesday and wasted little time making his presence felt in Bordeaux. The 24-year-old Belgian beat Geoffrey Blancaneaux 6-2, 6-1 in 1 hour and 5 minutes in the first round of the Challenger 175 event.

The result marked Collignon’s first match after a month away and sent the 68th-ranked player in the ATP rankings into the second round, where he will face Alexander Shevchenko. Shevchenko, ranked 85th, opened with a win over Hugo Gaston, setting up a meeting between two players inside the top 100 in a tournament worth 272,272 euros.

For Collignon, the return mattered because it came on clay, the surface where he has done most of his recent work. The Bordeaux tournament is only his second clay event of the season, after he defended his title in April at the Challenger 125 in Monza. He then skipped the clay Masters in Madrid and Rome because of a small wrist problem, leaving this week as a first real test of whether the issue had fully settled.

That test arrived in a field where Collignon is the only Belgian in the singles draw, while Sander Gillé is competing in doubles alongside Sem Verbeek. Gillé and Verbeek are scheduled to meet the second-seeded pair of Théo Arribagé and John Peers in the opening round, giving Belgium a second, separate interest in the same tournament.

Collignon’s next match should tell more than the scoreline in his opener. If his wrist holds up, he can continue in Bordeaux and still have the option of qualifying for the ATP 500 in Munich before Roland-Garros, a route that would keep his build-up to Paris moving after a stop-start spring. For now, he has already shown that a month off did not dull his level against lower-ranked opposition.