PARIS — On October 5, 1918, French aviator Roland Garros was shot down and killed near Vouziers in the Ardennes, one day before his 30th birthday and a month before the end of World War I. The first man to fly non-stop across the Mediterranean Sea, Garros never played tennis seriously, yet his name would become synonymous with the sport when the new stadium built to host the Davis Cup and the French Championships was named in his honor a decade later.
Born in 1888 in Saint-Denis de la Réunion and educated at the prestigious HEC school in Paris, Garros initially worked as a car seller near the Arc de Triomphe. An accomplished sportsman who turned to cycling to restore his health after severe pneumonia as a teenager, his life changed in August 1909 after witnessing an aircraft demonstration in Champagne. He bought an airplane, taught himself to fly and obtained his license in July 1910. Within two years he flew in the Bastille Day parades of July 14, set altitude records at 3,950m in 1911 and 5,610m in 1912, and in 1913 completed his most famous feat — an eight-hour non-stop flight from the south of France to Bizerte in Tunisia during which he fixed two engine malfunctions in flight.
During the Great War, Garros flew in the very first air battles and developed the first interrupted gear, a device that allowed French pilots to use a precise and powerful machine gun in flight and earn many victories in the early stages of the war. In 1915 his aircraft was shot down by ground fire and he was captured, remaining a prisoner of war for almost three years. The capture of his aircraft allowed the Germans to copy his interrupted gear and prevail in the air battles that followed. Garros escaped in 1918 and made his way back to Paris, rejoining the Army despite seriously deteriorated health before being shot down by the German army on October 5.
The link to tennis came at the end of 1927, after the famous Four Musketeers had won the Davis Cup for the first time. Directors from the Racing Club and the Stade Français made an offer to buy land at the Porte d’Auteuil in the west of Paris for a 10,000-seat arena to host the first Davis Cup Challenge Round to be held in France and to become a venue for the French Championships, using personal funds to secure the loan. Emile Lesieur, from the Stade Français, accepted on one condition: the new venue had to bear the name of a fellow member of the Stade Français who had died nearly 10 years earlier — Roland Garros. The venue became so linked with the French Championships in public memory that the tournament itself became known as Roland-Garros.