A rich man’s game? How Roland Garros host France turned its back on clay

Feverish support for local players has long been a fixture of the French Open, a privilege that comes with playing on home turf.

For many of those players, however, the “turf” itself hardly feels like home.

While Roland Garros is the ultimate symbol of clay, the French Open’s home country has produced remarkably few specialists of the ochre surface in recent decades. Some players, like Adrian Mannarino, are even described as being “allergic” to the red dirt.

Of the 30 French players who entered the tournament this year, only nine made it past the first round, the third lowest tally in the past three decades, suggesting yet another disappointing run for a nation starved of success.

Lining up for an ice cream outside the French Open’s centre court, local fans Benjamin and Pablo offered one explanation for the lack of home wins.

“In places like Spain or Argentina, the kids are practically raised on clay,” said the pair from the Basque Country, one sporting a Gallic horned helmet, the other a French tricolour. “But in France we play on pot-holed concrete courts.”

The demise of clay

Self-flagellation has been a recurrent theme at Roland Garros, particularly when recalling more successful times.

Three years ago, at an event making 40 years since Yannick Noah’s 1983 triumph, France’s last male champion had a stark piece of advice for youngsters hoping to emulate his feat: to pack their bags and go abroad.

“You have to go and nourish yourself elsewhere, because we're used to losing at all levels,” he said. “All coaches have lost. None of them have won. So you're surrounded by people who have all lost.”

Henri Leconte, the last Frenchman to reach a final, was even blunter a few years earlier as organisers marked three decades since his 1988 defeat.

“They don't train on clay as much as we used to,” said the flamboyant Leconte. “They are afraid to play at the French Open. They are always coming with an excuse, saying, ‘Oh, I have a bad back or elbow’.”

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Leconte was right about one thing: training on clay has indeed declined, though the players are hardly at fault.

In the 1950s, almost all tennis in France was played on clay. But by the mid-1970s, when the young Noah and Leconte were honing their skills, the percentage of clay courts had slumped to 50%.

Nowadays, they account for just 16% of the roughly 31,000 courts recognised by the French Tennis Federation (FFT). Tennis tournaments on French soil have largely followed the trend: just 19% on the men’s circuit are played on the red dirt, and 34% in the women’s.

In comparison, clay courts account for more than 60% of all courts in Spain, Italy and Switzerland, all of which have produced Grand Slam title winners in recent years, and up to 80% in Germany.

“That’s what we grew up on,” Germany’s Alexander Zverev said after his first-round win on Sunday, when quizzed about Europeans' greater agility on clay compared to Americans or Australians. “We move through the slippery surface better, because we’re used to it (...) Nobody can really teach you how to slide,” added the men’s second seed.

The paradox behind the decline of clay in France is that it coincided with a broader boom for the sport, spurred by the so-called “5,000 courts” plan launched in 1981 by the FFT’s then-president Philippe Chatrier – whose name was later given to the French Open’s centre court.

Aimed at helping small towns and villages to build their own courts, Chatrier’s plan accelerated a tenfold increase in the number of licensed players in the country, from 100,000 in the 1960s to more than 1 million in the 1990s.

The overwhelming majority of new courts, however, were made of concrete – a far cheaper and easier surface to build that also requires minimal maintenance. The concrete boom led many existing clubs to dig up their clay courts and switch to hard surfaces, accelerating the demise of clay.

Democratisation ultimately reinforced a social divide at the heart of tennis, says historian Patrick Clastres, who has co-authored a book on the history of the sport in France.

“Tennis has always been an elitist sport, associated with the leisure class,” he said. “Efforts to democratise tennis opened the sport to the middle class and even some working-class constituencies, while clay courts remained largely the preserve of a social elite.”

‘90% hassle’

Clay courts are made of layers of stones, gravel, clinker (a volcanic residue) and limestone, capped by a thin layer of crushed brick about two millimetres thick, which gives the courts their famous ochre hue.

Each of the French Open’s 18 courts requires more than a ton of clay, which has to be regularly watered to avoid it drying up and cracking. The heatwave pummeling Paris this week has kept the tournament’s 200 groundskeepers especially busy, requiring them to soak the courts at night and shower them with calcium chloride in the morning to help retain the surface moisture during the day.

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Such heavy maintenance translates into prohibitive costs for many clubs that operate on a fraction of the French Open’s budget.

In an interview with French daily Libération, the head of a tennis club in Normandy said clay courts “offered 10% of the benefits for 90% of the hassle”. He added: “A hard court just needs two hours with a pressure washer every year, that’s all. With clay, you have to reckon on a good seventy hours per court each year, just to redo the lines that crack in the frost and replenish the crushed brick.”

Since 2021, the FFT has offered clubs that remain committed to clay a maintenance grant of €800 per year per court. It also helps them build new courts, covering at least 30% of the cost, up to a limit of €100,000 per court.

Such measures are “not enough”, the federation’s head Gilles Moretton conceded last month in an interview with Le Monde, announcing plans to help clubs with ageing concrete courts to switch to hybridclay – a new surface that is much cheaper to build and maintain.

Just three centimetres thick, as opposed to one metre for traditional clay, the hybrid surface requires much less watering and does not need annual resurfacing. Converting a concrete court costs around €35,000 – 60% of which will be covered by the FFT.

The federation also plans to foster the development of more junior tournaments played on artificial clay to ensure young players get enough match practice on the surface, which experts say is virtually indistinguishable from ordinary clay.

According to Clastres, however, the subsidies remain “insufficient for many towns to save their struggling clubs, let alone switch back to clay”.

A formative surface

The decline of clay courts in France has in turn stripped French youngsters of a crucial formative experience on a surface that is widely regarded as the most demanding.

While it is notoriously difficult for players to adapt to grass tournaments like Wimbledon, clay requires the most tactical nous and the broadest palette of skills, featuring spin, slice, drop shots and the famous slides. The slowest of the three surfaces, it is also the most physically taxing.

According to Patrick Mouratoglou, who coached Serena Williams for a decade and founded France’s best known private tennis academy on the French Riviera, the country’s centralising instinct has also conspired to deny aspiring players some much-needed clay-court practice.

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“You don’t suddenly become good on clay when you’ve been training at the FFT’s National Training Centre in Paris, which is an indoor hard-court facility. It makes no sense,” he said. “The project is fundamentally flawed from the outset. All the more so because clay courts are extremely formative.”

Mouratoglou said any national training centre “should be outdoors, in the south of France”, where conditions are right for clay.

Critics, including Leconte, have also accused the FFT of choosing “quantity over quality”, fostering an abundance of young talents instead of focusing on the handful who are most promising.

Supporters of the French model, however, stress that individual success at Roland Garros and at the other majors is not the only measure of a sport’s success.

France has the second highest number of licensed players in Europe, after Germany. It is also one of the few countries that has succeeded in making tennis “genuinely popular”, said Clastres.

“In Italy and Spain, the climate means you can play all year on clay. In the US, college scholarships allow a select few to make it to the top. And in Eastern Europe, families have been willing to let their kids drop out of school to pursue a career in tennis,” he added.

“France has a different model, one that has brought the sport to a broader segment of the public and produced many players ranked among the top 100 – but relatively few Grand Slam champions.”

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