Stade de Roland Garros
Nikolay Davydenko serves to David Nalbandian on Court Suzanne Lenglen, 2006 French Open
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| Location | 16th arrondissement, Paris, France |
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| Capacity | 14,840 (Court Philippe-Chatrier) 10,068 (Court Suzanne-Lenglen) 3,800 (Court 1) |
| Surface | "Clay" (see text) |
| Opened | 1928 |
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Stade Roland Garros ("Roland Garros Stadium", French pronunciation: [stad ʁolɑ̃ ɡaʁɔs]) is a tennis venue complex located in Paris, France. It hosts the French Open, also known as Roland Garros, a Grand Slam championship tournament played annually around the end of May and the beginning of June. The facility was constructed in 1928 to host France's first defense of the Davis Cup. It is named for Roland Garros who was a pioneer aviator who completed the first solo flight across the Mediterranean Sea), engineer (inventor of the first forward-firing aircraft machine gun), and World War I hero (the first pilot to shoot down five enemy aircraft and to be called an "ace" for doing so), who was killed in aerial combat in 1918.
The 21-acre (8.5-hectare) complex contains twenty courts, including three large-capacity stadiums; Les Jardins de Roland-Garros, a large restaurant and bar complex;Le Village, the press and VIP area; France's National Training Centre (CNE); and the Tenniseum, a bilingual, multimedia museum of the history of tennis.
While the Roland Garros surface is invariably characterized as "red clay", the courts are in fact surfaced with white limestone covered with a few millimeters of powdered red brick dust. Beneath the 3-inch (7.6 cm) layer of porous limestone is 6 inches (15 cm) of volcanic rock, followed by a 3-foot (0.91 m) layer of sand, all of which rests on a slab of concrete. Crushed brick is pressed onto the limestone surface with rollers, then drenched in water. The process is repeated several times until a thin, compact layer coats each court. The crushed brick is deep enough to allow footprints and ball marks, but shallow enough to avoid making the court spongy or slippery. In tournament situations workers smooth the surface before matches and between sets by dragging rectangular lengths of chain-link across it. The red brick dust is replenished as needed (daily during major tournaments).
The surface was a state-of-the art solution, in 1928, to the biggest problem with natural clay courts: poor drainage. At the time it was not unusual for clay surfaces to be unplayable for two to three days after even short periods of precipitation. The limestone/crushed brick combination, originally developed in Britain, played and looked similar to clay without clay's drainage issues, thus rendering natural clay obsolete as a tennis court surface. Since then a multitude of other "fast-dry" and synthetic clay surfaces have been developed. Courts surfaced with these materials play much like natural clay surfaces and are collectively classified as "clay courts", despite the fact that few if any true clay courts have been built for almost a century. The diversity in composition of various "clay" surfaces around the world explains the extraordinary variability in their playing characteristics. “All clay courts are different,” Venus Williams has said. “None play the same. [Roland Garros] plays the best.”
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