French Open’s dizzying delight makes Wimbledon a winner

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club were the other, faraway winners when Carlos Alcaraz, 22, beat Jannik Sinner, 23, in Sunday’s exhilarating French Open final.

The eulogies for that showdown have matched the game’s sweep of stunning shots. Three weeks out from Wimbledon men’s tennis has regained top billing in Britain’s sporting summer. Middle England has struck lucky again.

“The tennis right now is higher than I’ve ever seen,” said John McEnroe of the Alcaraz-Sinner final at Roland Garros. The match took a record five hours 29 minutes and was tagged straight away as a masterpiece of the sport, true to its gift for dressing up savage combat as a nice Sunday afternoon watch.

Wimbledon is the next beneficiary in line. For 20 years the All England club sold golden tickets to its patrons. Like the RSC at Stratford it could guarantee world-class drama of reliable brilliance and intensity. Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray were an SW19 fixture and impresario's fantasy.

Not since the Ali-Frazier-Foreman era in boxing had a sport been able to present such a constellation of rivals over such a long span of time. The women’s game had the Williams sisters (Serena and Venus) and now Coco Gauff has boosted this year’s Wimbledon too with her French Open victory. Nobody though could have expected the men’s side to recover so quickly from three of the ‘big four’ retiring.

Surely, only a hiatus could follow the freakishly consistent prime-time entertainment delivered by men who won every Wimbledon men’s singles title for 19 years (2003-2022). The All England Club busied itself with structural expansion in the hope a new golden age would show up some distant day.

The hyperbole flowing out of Paris is one sign that the wait is already over. Gracious as ever, Federer was the most generous in his acclaim, posting: “Three winners in Paris today. Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and the beautiful game of tennis.”

Make that four. Wimbledon too cashed in. To its once-a-year disciples the All England Club has a hypnotic vibe but the real stuff of Wimbledon fortnight is gladiatorial combat. It’s one v one under conditions of withering scrutiny and stress.

The best Wimbledon finals are indelible: Andy Murray ending Britain’s 77-year wait for a men’s singles title; the sublime Federer-Nadal final of 2008, which took almost seven hours and ended in near darkness; Arthur Ashe beating Jimmy Connors in 1975. Anyone who saw Federer live on Centre Court understands why so many intellectuals tried to locate him at the nexus of sport and art.

It didn’t start with the big four. Bjorn Borg, McEnroe and many others set a standard that rarely dips. In 1999 Pete Sampras found inside himself a transcendent level of accuracy and power to blow Andre Agassi away.

In 2023 and again last year Spain’s Alcaraz assumed Nadal’s national role and beat Djokovic in consecutive Wimbledon finals. Promising. But it took until Sunday’s extravaganza in Paris for Wimbledon’s hamper to feel fully packed again. Alcaraz’s five-set victory over Sinner in that match and the rise of Britain’s Jack Draper, 23, to World No 4 have restored all the sporting ingredients Wimbledon sells to its crowds alongside ambience and garden party fare.

Fizzy verdicts are still rolling in. The former French Open runner-up Robin Soderling said: “When you thought tennis had reached its highest potential with the big three [Federer, Djokovic, Nadal] these guys just took it to the next level.” An even better qualified judge, the boy wonder Wimbledon champion Boris Becker, insisted that Alcaraz and Sinner are at “exactly the level” of the four men who won 66 out of 84 Grand Slam titles and spent more than 18 years between them at the top of the world rankings.

Privately the big four might start wincing at the praise lavished on Alcaraz and Sinner. The calling card of Federer, Djokovic, Nadal and Murray was astonishing longevity. They carved the tennis world into empires. Only age compelled them to retreat.

Djokovic is still out there, defending the old guard’s honour, and pursuing a 25th Grand Slam title, so the new wave have not completely taken over. Murray has had a six-month spell as Djokovic’s coach. Nadal is busy with his academy and Federer is tending to his foundation. Each is a statesman and a walking showreel of intense Wimbledon spectacles.

Paris, on Sunday, has made men’s tennis dizzy again. Over-statement is rife. The news cycle breeds it. Yet this year’s Wimbledon is within its rights to feel that French Open frisson coursing through its corridors. The big four though might ask that we check in with them again in 10 or 15 years.

Photograph by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images