Some time during the late 20th century, an administrator at a hunting club in the hill village of El Palmar, in the Murcia region of Spain, decided to install a tennis court at the site. Hard courts may have been cheaper, but the Spanish love the red stuff. His son would go on to have a short career before becoming a coach on the same courts, and by the time his grandson, the third generation in a lineage of tennis-mad men, began to show promise as a junior competitor skimping and sliding on clay, coaches and onlookers saw it as a sign of providence – that this was going to be the next big clay-courter to come out of a country that has famously provided so many.
On Sunday, Carlos Alcaraz would confirm their telling. In a tense, patchy, low-quality grind on a windy afternoon on Court Philippe Chatrier, the 21-year-old defeated the German fourth seed Alexander Zverev 6-3, 2-6, 5-7, 6-1, 6-4 to lift his first French Open title. He becomes the seventh Spaniard in the Open Era to lift the Roland Garros trophy.
CARLOS I, PRINCE OF CLAY 👑 #RolandGarros pic.twitter.com/lZWMplAmYK — Roland-Garros (@rolandgarros) June 9, 2024 In doing so, he also saved the tournament organisers the blushes of handing over the ‘Musketeers Trophy’ to a man embroiled in a legal case of domestic abuse during the course of the tournament.
Advertisement “I call us a team, but it’s a family,” Alcaraz said on court in acknowledgement of the tough preparations for the tournament due to an arm i.