The red shale at Roland Garros is the trickiest surface in the tennis world. Rafael Nadal may have won the most number of titles on the same clay and yet, apart from dirty shorts, any champion would be a tired man at the end of a successful campaign at the Paris stadium. No surprise once Nadal was overwhelmed that there should still be a surprise at the end of it with Stanislas Wawrinka beating Novak Djokovic to become the oldest winner of the event since Andres Gomez in 1990.
Also dashed with the Djoker’s defeat was the optimism over the tennis world possibly seeing a calendar Grand Slam again. The World No. 1 was ticking over smoothly after the Australian Open win and had a whiff of a chance to sweep all the slams in 2015. His record on the other surfaces was always good enough to give him this one opportunity of emulating Rod Laver, the last player to do the calendar slam, back in 1969 and 1970.
A measure of the challenge of winning on all four Grand Slam surfaces is the vast differences among French clay, English grass and the artificial surfaces at the Australian and US Opens. Not even “Ice Man” Bjorn Borg could win all four titles, with the US Open eluding him. Of course, champions have proved capable of playing the all-round tennis needed to win on all four surfaces, as Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have, and so too Andre Agassi. But no one in some 45 years has been able to do the calendar slam, the holy grail of modern tennis.
