Person involvedRoland Garros
- The early life of Roland Garros
Roland Garros was born in 1888 in Saint-Denis de la Réunion. However, he studied in Paris at the prestigious HEC school before starting his own business as a car salesman near the Arc de Triomphe. Garros was an accomplished athlete who took up cycling in particular to recover from severe pneumonia in his teenage years, but he never played tennis seriously. His life changed forever in August 1909 when he witnessed an airplane display in Champagne and enjoyed it so much that he decided to become an aviator. He immediately bought an airplane, learned to fly it himself and received his license already in July 1910.
Just two years after taking off, adventurer Roland Garros took part in the July 14th Bastille Day parades. However, he also competed in several races and set two altitude records, the first at 3,950 m in 1911 and the second, the most famous achievement of 5,610 m (18.41, 18.41). The first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean in 1913, from the south of France to Bizerte in Tunis, a journey that took eight hours, during which he had to fix two engine faults. At the time, this achievement earned him considerable fame.
During the Great War, Roland Garros took part in the very first air battles, and it was he who developed the first interception kit. Thanks to this device, French pilots could use an accurate and powerful machine gun in flight, which brought them many victories in air battles in the early stages of the war.
In 1915, Garos’ plane was shot down by ground fire. He was captured and not only became a prisoner of war for almost three years, but the capture of his plane allowed the Germans to copy his abortive gear and win the air battles that followed.
In 1918, Garos managed to escape and return to Paris. His health had seriously deteriorated, but he decided to rejoin the army. On October 5, 1918, he was shot and killed near Vozieres in the Ardennes, one month before the end of the war and one day before his 30th birthday.
What next??
At the end of 1927, after the famous Four Musketeers won the Davis Cup for the first time, the directors of the Racing Club and Stade Francais made an offer to buy land in Paris d’Otto, west of Paris. There, they wanted to build the 10,000-seat stadium needed to host the first Davis Cup Challenge Round in France, as well as make it a great venue for the French Championships. They went so far as to use personal funds to secure the loan, which Emile Lezier of Stade Français accepted on one condition. the new venue was to be named after a member of the Stade Français. This fellow member was Roland Garros, who died about 10 years ago. In public memory, the new venue will become so associated with the French Championship in the eyes of the general public that the tournament itself will be known as: Roland Garros.
