French Open

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The French Open's everyday name, Roland Garros, honors a French aviator who never played competitive tennis. Roland Garros was the first pilot to fly solo across the Mediterranean Sea, in 1913, and he died in aerial combat in 1918, seventy nine days before the Armistice that ended the First World War. When the French Tennis Federation built a new stadium in the Paris suburb of Auteuil in 1928, to host the Davis Cup after France's team, the Four Musketeers, had won the trophy the previous year, a federation official who had served alongside Garros proposed naming the new grounds after his fallen friend, on the condition that the stadium always bear his name.

The stadium's construction in 1928 also marks the year many histories treat as the true founding of the modern French Open, distinct from the French Championships that had existed since 1891. Before 1925 the Championships were closed to anyone who was not a member of a French tennis club, which in practice meant French nationals; the tournament opened to international entrants only in 1925, three years before the move to the stadium that gave the event its lasting name.

The clay surface that now defines the tournament's identity, the slowest of the four majors, was already the standard playing surface in France by the time of the move, but it became a genuinely international talking point only once the world's best players began arriving in numbers after 1925.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Women joined the French Championships in 1897, six years after the men's event began in 1891, a shorter gap than either the Australian Championships or the US Championships allowed. For its first three and a half decades the tournament remained closed to anyone who was not a member of a French club, a restriction that meant the championship, however strong its home grown fields, could not claim to crown a genuine world champion.

That changed in 1925, when the French Championships opened to international entrants for the first time, immediately drawing the era's leading foreign players into a field that had previously been a purely domestic affair. The change came the same decade France's own Four Musketeers, Jean Borotra, Jacques Brugnon, Henri Cochet and Rene Lacoste, were becoming the dominant force in men's tennis worldwide, and the newly international French Championships gave Parisian crowds a stage to watch them face the world's other best players rather than only each other.

Like the other three majors, the tournament turned fully professional in 1968 with the start of the Open Era, ending the distinction between amateur and professional entrants that had shaped tennis since the sport's beginnings. The French Open's clay courts, unusually slow and physically demanding compared to grass or hard courts, have since made it the major most associated with long, attritional five set matches, a reputation that predates the Open Era but has only deepened since professional players began entering every year without exception.