Like it was yesterday. The crowd on the Philippe-Chatrier court goes wild. Yannick Noah triumphed at Roland-Garros on June 5, 1983, thirty-seven years after Marcel Bernard, the last Frenchman to win at Porte d’Auteuil. The one who lived in Yaoundé, Cameroon, for the first years of his life, was then 23 years old and was announced as one of the favorites of the tournament. This year, he has won Madrid and Hamburg, played in the final in Lisbon and is seeded number 6 at Roland-Garros. “There are expectations that are not expectations of insane hope,” said Jean-Paul Loth, then national technical director of the French Tennis Federation. Everyone thinks that, finally, we can have a winner. »
The story begins in Monte-Carlo after Yannick Noah lost in the quarter-finals against Spaniard Manuel Orantes (6-2, 6-7, 3-6). Two months from Roland-Garros, it’s a poor performance, an alert for his coach, Patrice Hagelauer: “It was not the Yannick I knew. We had a little explanation after the match. I said to him: “At some point you have to agree with yourself, do you really want to win Roland-Garros?” Yannick Noah reacted immediately and trained particularly hard: four to five hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, followed by three-quarters of an hour of racing, all away from the hustle and bustle of Paris. “He worked like crazy, he was always demanding, it was incredible,” recalls Patrice Hagelauer.
On May 23, the Roland-Garros tournament begins. Yannick Noah easily won his first rounds, against the Swede Anders Järryd (6-1, 6-0, 6-2), the Paraguayan Victor Pecci (7-5, 7-6, 6-2), the American Pat Dupré (7-5, 7-6, 6-2) and Australian John Alexander (6-2, 7-6, 6-2). “Yannick knew exactly what he had to do: push the other guy around, bulldoze him,” says Patrice Hagelauer. Then stands in his way, in the quarter-finals, a player of the same age, formidable and whom he knows well: the Czech Ivan Lendl.
It’s not one but two French who find themselves in the semi-finals of the tournament. Unheard of at this stage of the competition. Christophe Roger-Vasselin has just achieved a monumental feat by eliminating world number 1, Jimmy Connors, but fails to repeat this performance against his compatriot. “Christophe had finished his tournament a bit, he was physically and psychologically exhausted. He was not used to these moments, the big tournaments, ”underlines Patrice Hagelauer. Yannick Noah leaves only three short games to his opponent and wins 6-3, 6-0, 6-0.
The Swede is the little prodigy. He is not yet 19 and has already won the Australian Open earlier this year and the last edition of Roland-Garros. But Yannick Noah knows how to overcome it and that makes all the difference. He beat him in Hamburg in the quarter-finals (6-4, 6-4) and certainly lost in the final in Lisbon, but having had two match points. “Yannick is convinced that a fit forward can beat a defender,” Hagelauer said.
A few hours after the final, it’s party time at Yannick Noah’s, in Nainville-les-Roches, in Essonne. All his relatives are present as well as the whole village. The evening went down in history with an improvised concert by the group Télephone (Louis Bertignac, Jean-Louis Aubert and their friends). The pool is packed and the booze is flowing to celebrate.
