which department have French participants come from since 1983?

It’s not the first time, but Fiona Ferro and Lucas Pouille will return to the fields of Roland-Garros, from Sunday 28 May, for the first round of the Parisian Major. After qualifying, the two Frenchmen will swell the Italian contingent for this 2023 edition which now stands at 29 (19 for men, 10 for women).

Since 1983, 231 French players have played in the first round of Roland-Garros in singles. To mark the 40th anniversary of Yannick Noah’s victory at the Porte d’Auteuil, franceinfo:sport dug into its archives to find out where they came from.

Paris crushes the competition

Note that 25 players are not on this card because they were born abroad (Luca Van Assche, Dominique Bedel, Christophe Roger-Vasselin, Guy Forget, Tarik Benhabiles, Jacques Hervet, Frédéric Fontang, Arnaud Di Pasquale, Marc Gicquel, Alexandre Sidorenko, Enzo Couacaud, Catherine Suire, Nathalie Tauziat, Noëlle Van Lottum, Mary Pierce, Karolina Jagieniak, Yulia Fedossova, Mathilde Johansson, Irena Pavlovic, Iryna Brémond, Fiona Ferro and Carole Monnet) or in the Dom-Tom (Nathalie Dechy, Gianni Mina and Fabrice Santoro).

Île-de-France and especially Paris dominate this ranking. The region has one of the largest club pools in France, as well as in the South West and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region.

The Hauts-de-Seine resist

If Paris and its 19 champions logically maintain a lead in the number of attendances each year at Roland-Garros, the Hauts-de-Seine, which accounts for half the players, has shown quite impressive regularity since 1983. Cédric Pioline, Eric Winogradsky or even Alexandra Fusai are not there at all.