Jacques Vendroux and Sébastien Guyot, edited by Gauthier Delomez / Photo credits: LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
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2:21 p.m., May 18, 2023
For the 40th anniversary of Yannick Noah’s victory at Roland-Garros, Europe 1, the tournament’s official radio, went to Cameroon to meet the French tennis legend who agreed to confide in Jacques for a long time. Vendroux. A testimony to discover in full in an event podcast available on May 30th.
Yannick Noah celebrates his 63rd birthday this Thursday, May 18, and in a few days, he will also celebrate the 40th anniversary of his victory at Roland-Garros. It was June 5, 1983. Moreover, he will not be the only one to commemorate this victory – the last for a Frenchman – since the organizers are planning a tribute edition this year. For the occasion, Europe 1, official radio station of Roland-Garros, devotes an event podcast to the tricolor tennis legend. From his childhood in Cameroon to his return to Africa as a “village chief”, passing through his success as a singer and of course the victory of 1983, Yannick Noah confided as never before to the microphone of journalist Jacques Vendroux. A podcast in ten episodes to discover from May 30th.
Among his memories, Yannick Noah goes back in particular to his childhood, in Cameroon, in Yaoundé, where he was already hitting the little yellow ball when he was in his room…
“Routes” with his parents
The former world number 3 in 1986 says that very young, he played tennis and “wall”. “Even in my room, I was robbing. The only problem is that here [au Cameroun, NDLR]the earth is red, and when you have a ball with red earth on white walls, it left traces, and my parents didn’t really like it,” he explains. “Once, they redid the paint, I waited a little while after my first rouste”, underlines the former champion, before evoking a “second rouste”. “It was stronger than me: I thought maybe than with a cleaner ball… And inevitably, at one point, there were traces”, he recalls, at the microphone of Jacques Vendroux.
Yannick Noah remembers that his wall kept bullet marks “until there was my poster of Arthur Ashe in 1971, when I was 11 years old”. The future French prodigy met his idol that year, who had come to exchange a few balls in Yaoundé and who would give him his tennis racket. The beginning of the legend Yannick Noah.