On June 5, 1983, Yannick Noah put Roland Garros and France on their feet.

Sunday, June 5, 1983. Sweet euphoria floats in the heat of the capital. Yannick Noah is in the French Open final. At the age of 23, the Frenchman (seed n^Oh 6) Those who see it as only a dilettante lie acted against only one set Sad Czechoslovakian Mr. Ivan Lendl, in the quarter finals.

In the semifinals, he made fun of his compatriot Christophe Roger-Vasselin (6-3, 6-0, 6-0). He has only one obstacle left to overcome: the young (18) and already experienced Mats Wilander (N.^Oh 5), strangled Argentina’s Guillermo Vilas, winner the year before, but whom Noah had just beaten in Hamburg.

Between the Frenchman and his Rasta—in wool, we learn later—and the Swede in the rings, it’s hard to draw a sharper contrast in style. A boisterous striker against a timid release. Hot-blooded tennis versus cold-blooded tennis.

The stadium is overcrowded, with 18,000 spectators on the steps attacking. The rest of France is stuck in front of his small screen. “50 Million Noah”title team the day before the final.

“When we arrived at the stadium, there was real electricity in the communityNoah’s first cousin Christophe Gibeau, born a month before him, remembers. The weather was very good, we could smell the trees of the plane, the beaten earth, the smell of dust…” The young man has just finished his military service and discovers that day Roland Garros and his dignity. Panama hats and canoeists fill the boxes, Auteuil’s Tiers-Etat distributed bobsleds in the stands. “I found the people nice and classy, ​​I came from the provinces”, says a cautious resident of Grenoble. He sits in the visitors’ gallery, just above the Noah clan, on the edge of the court, where his mother, Marie-Claire, two sisters and father, Zachary, a soccer Coupe de France winner, are seated. With a sedan when Yannick was 1 year old.

Psychological Ascent

Opposite, in the Presidential Gallery, Michel Sardu and Enrico Macias cut the last of the fat, not far from the mouth of Jean-Paul Belmondo, the physicist Louis Leprince-Ringe and his eternal pipe (Evin’s law has not yet been announced…) and several political figures, including Jacques Attal, Special Adviser to then President Mitterrand, and Culture Minister Jack Lang. In the front row, the president of the French Tennis Federation, Philippe Chatrier, is suffocating in a suit.