«As a boy in Nice I used to collect food on the street due to hunger»- Corriere.it

How do you win Roland Garros? Yannick Noah who triumphed on the Parisian field 40 years ago, in 1983, the last French player to succeed, in an interview with Equipe tells how victory is built. His recipe? Simple, you have to make yourself a winner first. As? And here the difficulty begins. It is often rhetorically said in sport that to win you need to be “hungry” for victories, but what initially drove a very young Noah was only hunger, the real one. “My parents sent me to a tennis college in France when I was 12 with a one-way ticket and zero money. I was hungry, I was picking things up on the street a Nice where I had nothing to eat. Food, pieces of chocolate. I was starving. Even when I went to my first Roland Garros junior where a friend of my parents had given me an apartment on the Rue de France, a superb apartment. But I had zero francs. And when you’re at Roland Garros and you can’t count on a good meal every day because you’re too young… But now I can say that I went to Roland Garros junior and I didn’t eat. This strengthens.”

But, Noah points out, victory isn’t just a vital necessity to get out of a reality of despair, but something you have to create within yourself as well. “How did I learn to win? It wasn’t my father who taught me to win but the fact that I knew where I came from. I’ve never forgotten that. And very often there was a big difference between what people thought of me and what I had inside me. I wanted to win to show that I could do it because I was a young French promise from Cameroon that he had to go up against a tidal wave of unnecessary criticism, skepticism and sometimes cynicism every day. But if I said I wanted to win, I would have gotten my ass kicked. So I kept everything inside and that was my strength. Some people hurt me a bit and my only defense was to think about winning first and then about winning».

But underline before winning Noah, we must prepare ourselves to overcome another abyss, that of solitude. «You leave with only one ticket because you don’t have enough money to pay for a return ticket. And then those moments in the evening when the lights go out and you wonder where you are… There wasn’t a video, there wasn’t a mobile phone, no WhatsApp, no messages, just a five-minute collect call each fifteen days. No, I didn’t have a racket, they lent it to me. I’ve been playing with the same ball for a year. Stuff like that. So I want, I have to convince myself that this dream of victory awaits me and I will make it come true. I don’t have a plan B. After all, the desire to win is not something you are born with. It’s a life path. My parents separated when I was little and between the time they were together and when they separated, there were some problems. I didn’t like boarding school but it was an opportunity for me because I’d rather be there than at home. You love your parents and when you see them fighting it’s heartbreaking. Some will say I was amazing being alone for years in a boarding school playing tennis, but no, that was my path, my karma, my destiny. I had to go through it.”

His destiny is to make his dream come true. And the dream for tennis player Noah needless to say is called Roland Garros. “I never dreamed of winning Wimbledon. I don’t even want to mention the US Open and the Australian Open even less. But Roland Garros was my ultimate goal. Looking back, I tell myself of course that I couldn’t win another Grand Slam tournament. Why couldn’t I? But then after winning I thought: what more could I want? It was all so beautiful, so perfect. I once met Chris Evert, a tennis player who has won 18 Grand Slam titles and I told her I was embarrassed to talk to her because she had won 18 Grand Slam titles and I only had one. But she replied: “But Yannick, I won Roland Garros the year you won. And remembering what I’ve seen on and off the pitch, I’d trade 10 of my Grand Slam titles for one like yours, because I’ve never experienced anything like this in my career.” And she was right: there are people who have won much more and have not experienced half of what I have experienced ».

After all, Noah explains it was a special moment that defined not only his career, but his life: «There was this expectation of an entire generation of tennis players and sportsmen who were living it through me. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but I felt there was something powerful. I thought: I’ve done thousands of solo serves where I hit the line four times in a row, which was a small thing for a good tennis player, but only if you’re solo. It’s not the same on the pitch, suddenly you can unleash happiness. Once I was on a train and a gentleman approached me and told me that it was he who had cried in front of the TV with his children immediately after the last exchange in the final. We are no longer talking about tennis, but about what pushes you to the limit and the wonderful thing is to be able to share it. And pass it on to others. The energy it gives Nadal to a little boy who takes the field anywhere in Spain! When a child arrives on a course in Spain for the first time, it is said that it is possible to win Roland. It’s beautiful. He has the power to make people dream ».

And then concludes. «Because I haven’t won yet, because I haven’t won again Roland Garros or another Grand Slam title? It’s not that I couldn’t, that I didn’t have the strength to win back, it’s just that I no longer had the dream. And if I don’t dream, it’s not good. And then I started to start dreaming about other things».