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Published: November 15th 2008
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Jez and I were both exhausted from our Tour de France the day before but had planned to get up early to get to the French Tennis open. We both slept in. Once awake we found a supermarket and bought a veritable feast. We tried to get to Roland Garros (where the French Open is played) as fast as possible but managed to get lost. We saw what looked like a big stadium, but it turned out to be Paris Saint Germain football club. A local helpfully pointed us in the right direction and soon we were inside. We only had general admission tickets so thought we wouldn’t get to see any games live. We were pleasantly surprised to know we could go into one of the grandstands and watch some of the masters games. Unfortunately we had missed Goran Ivanesivic, Pat Cash and Michael Stich playing in the morning but got to see former doubles world champion Todd Woodbridge and then Guillermo Vilas a former winner of the French Open.
Jez and I were both killing ourselves laughing watching the ball boys. They were hard core. When they have too many tennis balls they roll them across the back
of the court to the other ball boy. They do a huge wind up and look like they’re going to throw their arm out of it’s socket. We were thinking Will Ferrell should do a movie where he is a ball boy. It’s probably being written as we speak.
It would have been great to get tickets to the women’s final but it was all done on ballot so we missed out. Thankfully they were showing the game on a giant screen in one of the other courts. It started raining just as the final started but fortunately dissipated shortly after. The two finalists were Ana Ivanovic of Serbia and Dinara Safina of Russia. It was a good battle, but Ivanovic seemed to win the big points when it counted and took the title. Once she had won she clambered onto a chair and jumped up into the stands to be with her family and crew. Jez was wishing he was part of her crew as she hugged them.
Before the men’s doubles final we went and had a look at the tennis museum. I liked the old-school rackets and ball machines. Technology has come a long way,
in tennis circles Rene Lacoste has been instrumental in that progress. We read about him and how he revolutionized tennis. That was quite interesting, the men’s doubles final wasn’t. Well it might have been but Jez and I were both exhausted and kept falling asleep in the grandstand. Before leaving Jez sneaked onto a back court and played a few outrageous strokes. Shame he didn’t have a racket, ball or opponent.
On the way back to the train station we noticed a bar playing the first game of the Euro 2008 football championship. We sat and had a few ridiculously overpriced cokes as we watched the Czech Republic beat Switzerland.
During our cycling tour we didn’t go down the Champs Elysee because of the manic traffic. We thought we’d check it out along with the world famous Arc d’Triomphe. You can’t picture the traffic until you are actually standing amongst it, crazy stuff. We ambled along and watched a couple of break dancing buskers who had ‘mad skills’.
Our busabout guide had told us that on average there is a crash on the roundabout that circles the Arc d’Triomphe every 8 minutes and that you can’t claim
insurance if you do crash there. We set up camp and started watching. It is quite a good spectator sport. Unfortunately for us and fortunately for all the drivers we didn’t see a crash, the closest we got was a guy parked down a side street holding his front fender which had been smashed off.
As the sunset the Arc d’Triomphe turned an impressive pink shade. We snapped plenty of pictures before getting peckish. We had passed a restaurant when we first drove into Paris that served authentic French food. We wanted to try some frog legs and snails. But to cut a long story short we got lost, massively, so settled for the same as last night - dodgy kebabs.
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