Juan Carlos Ferrero (43) has requested the turn to speak.
He did it this Sunday, on the eve of the premiere of Carlos Alcaraz (20) in Paris, post-Nadal Paris.
(This Monday, the Murcian talent debuts against the Italian Flavio Cobolli, the 159th in the world).
The Alcaraz coach attended the reporters in the Roland Garros press center, in the belly of the Philippe Chatrier. A couple of floors higher, Stéfanos Tsitsipás, the fifth favorite, insisted that he would need four sets to get rid of Jiri Vesely, 7-5, 6-3, 4-6 and 7-6 (7).
This last issue seemed mundane: the triumph of the Greek colossus has barely made its way into the tennis imagination.
Well, this was a Sunday of ephemeris: it was forty years since the last triumph of a French tennis player in Paris. Roland Garros honored Yannick Noah.
Noah is 63 years old today, has been married three times and has had four children. One of them, Joakim, has played in the NBA. Gilles Moreton and Amélie Mauresmo, faces of the contemporary tennis bureaucracy, accompanied Noah, who was attending the unveiling of a fresco in his honor. Jay Ramier, an artist from Guadeloupe, has portrayed him on the wall of the players' building, today renamed the Yannick Noah 1983 Building.
While Tsitsipás, Noah and Roland Garros were on their own, Ferrero was on his own. This Sunday lived his own anniversary, the memory of his title in Paris.
Sitting in front of the journalists, Ferrero would go back to those times, when they called him the mosquito and he himself was at the top of tennis. Twenty years have passed since his title at Roland Garros (2003), the one that had paved the way for him to world leadership (he would reach it three months later, in September, after being a finalist at the US Open).
-Sometimes I have sat next to Alcaraz and we have reviewed my ending -Ferrero confessed-. And it is true that tennis players today find it difficult to watch a complete match. But reviewing it together has allowed me to convey concepts such as body language or shapes.
Ferrero was referring to his victory over the Dutchman Martin Verkerk, a manual one-hit wonder who had never seen anything like this before and who would never do it again afterwards (his best ranking was going to be 14th: Verkerk would never go further beyond the third round of a major, he only won two minor ATP titles, in Milan and in Amersfoot).
-As Verkerk had beaten Moyá (in the quarterfinals), that had made me very nervous. However, once on the court, I told myself that he had less experience than me in these types of matches and that helped me to win - confessed Ferrero, who won in three sets, 6-1, 6-3 and 6-2, after one of the least disputed finals in the history of the tournament.
-And how do you see your pupil now? she asked herself later.
-The fact that you have already won a Grand Slam (the 2022 US Open) can help you convince yourself that you can do it again and control the pressure.
But will you have more pressure?
-There are still things left, as was demonstrated in Rome (in his last performance at the Foro Italico, twelve days ago, the Murcian got stuck before the unknown Fabian Marozsan, who beat him in the second round). If you have a regular day and your rival a good one, you go home. To be the best you have to prove it.
(This Monday also debuts the Serbian Novak Djokovic, third favorite, against Aleksandar Kovacevic; both Alcaraz and Djokovic are on the same side of the draw, so both could meet in the semifinals).
