The history nobody advertises
When Roland Garros publishes its history, it starts with the clay courts and the roses. It tends to skip September 1939 through June 1940, when the stadium served as a detention camp for what the French government called "undesirable foreigners." The people detained there were primarily Jews of German and Austrian origin who had fled the Third Reich to France. The French government locked them in the Roland Garros stadium — under the stairways, on wet straw — before the Nazis had even arrived.
Arthur Koestler, the journalist and writer who was interned there, described it in his memoir: "We called ourselves the cave dwellers. We slept on wet straw. We were so crammed in, we felt like sardines. It smells of filth and excrement." Approximately 600 people were held there. The conditions were deliberately poor. This was not Nazi Germany — this was the French Republic, acting under its own authority, before the German occupation.
Tennis resumed on the same courts in 1941, during the German occupation, under the name Tournoi de France. Roland Garros's own official history has, for most of its existence, made no mention of this period. The stadium's name comes from Roland Garros, a French aviator and pioneer of aerial warfare who died in 1918. He had no connection to tennis. The tournament was named after him in 1928.
The scheduling war
Roland Garros introduced night sessions in 2021 when the retractable roof on Court Philippe Chatrier was completed. Night sessions under the roof, starting at 9:15pm, became the tournament's premium product — high attendance, Amazon Prime broadcasting, the matches that the world watches live regardless of time zone.
From 2021 through 2025, 52 night sessions were played. Four featured women's matches. In 2025, the number was zero.
Players noticed. Ons Jabeur said: "You don't show women's sport, then you ask why people watch more men. Of course they watch more men because you show men more. Everything goes together." Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula, and Madison Keys all made similar points at various press conferences. The pattern was not subtle: women's matches, including semifinal and quarterfinal matches between top-10 players, were consistently placed in afternoon slots on secondary courts while lower-ranked men's matches were given prime-time Chatrier slots.
The tournament director defending these decisions was Amelie Mauresmo — a former world number one and two-time Grand Slam champion, one of the greatest players the women's game has produced. Her argument was that men's five-set matches were better suited for prime-time because of length, and that Amazon Prime's broadcasting contract allowed only one match per night session, forcing a choice. This is not an unreasonable argument. It also doesn't fully explain the 52-4 split over five years.
Patrick Mouratoglou, Swiatek's former coach, said publicly that Swiatek was "not a star" in the commercial sense required to justify a night session slot. The comment landed poorly, given that Swiatek had four Roland Garros titles at the time and was the world number one.
The doping cloud
The two best players in the world heading into Roland Garros 2026 — Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek — have both served doping suspensions in recent years.
Sinner tested positive for clostebol, a banned steroid, in March 2024. The amounts detected were trace-level (86 picograms per litre). An independent tribunal ruled there was "no fault or negligence" — Sinner's physical therapist had used a spray containing clostebol on his own skin and subsequently gave Sinner a massage. WADA appealed. In February 2025, Sinner agreed to a three-month suspension that ran from February 9 to May 4, 2025 — clearing him to return just before Roland Garros.
Swiatek tested positive for trimetazidine, a heart medication, in August 2024. The source was contaminated melatonin tablets purchased in Poland. Her suspension was one month. The case was kept secret by the relevant authorities for months before being made public, which generated significant secondary controversy about transparency in tennis's doping enforcement.
Both players returned and competed at the highest level. Both cases were resolved with relatively short bans and with the players maintaining that contamination, not intentional doping, was responsible.
The comparison that critics raised: Simona Halep, a former Roland Garros champion and world number one, received a four-year ban for roxadustat at the 2022 US Open, later reduced to nine months. A Spanish figure skater named Laura Barquero received a six-year ban for clostebol — the same substance as Sinner, at a higher concentration — while Sinner received three months. The Spanish Tennis Federation's president called for an external investigation into "differential treatment" based on a player's ranking and commercial value. Djokovic has made similar remarks publicly.
These questions don't have clean answers. The anti-doping system is supposed to apply equally regardless of the player's name. Whether it does is something the tennis authorities have been reluctant to address directly.
The crowd
Roland Garros has a crowd problem, and it has had it for a long time. The French spectators are among the most passionate in tennis and among the most comfortable making that passion felt in ways that are considered unacceptable at other tournaments.
In 2022, Novak Djokovic entered Court Philippe Chatrier to whistling and booing. Not because he had done anything wrong, but because he was not French and the French crowd preferred their players. He broke his racquet during the match in visible frustration. The crowd whistled louder.
In 2025, Mirra Andreeva, 18 years old and playing against a French crowd that was actively against her, was booed after winning a close first-set tiebreak. The crowd made noise between her first and second serves — a particular violation of tennis etiquette that crosses from partisanship into genuine interference with play.
Jaume Munar, a Spanish player, said the Roland Garros crowd showed "an absolute lack of respect." Serena Williams, at various points in her career, played matches in Paris where portions of the crowd audibly cheered her mistakes. Alcohol was banned from the stands in 2024 after tournament organizers warned that the crowd behavior had reached the level of what they called "hooliganism."
None of this is exclusively a Roland Garros problem — every major tournament has crowd incidents. Roland Garros has them more consistently and more explicitly than the others, and the tournament has historically done less to address them than Wimbledon or the Australian Open.
What to make of all this
Roland Garros is also the tournament that produced the most extraordinary dynasty in professional sports history, that made Federer cry at the trophy ceremony in a good way, that gave Michael Chang his title at 17 years old, that Nadal called "my second home." The controversies listed here are real and some of them are significant, but they exist alongside something genuine and beautiful in the event.
The scheduling discrimination against women's tennis is a serious ongoing problem with no resolution in sight. The doping cases raise legitimate questions about how anti-doping enforcement actually works at the top of professional tennis. The crowd behavior is consistently worse than at comparable events. The wartime history deserves more acknowledgment than it receives.
None of this makes Roland Garros less worth watching. It makes it more complicated, which is usually what happens when you look at anything closely enough.
