Gabriela Dabrowski of Canada and Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada celebrate after winning their mixed-doubles bronze medal match against Demi Schuurs of Netherlands and Wesley Koolhof of Netherlands on Aug. 2.Angelika Warmuth/Reuters
On a day in which he was reminded of his place in the men’s game, and also climbed onto an Olympic podium, you could forgive Félix Auger-Aliassime for acting a little out of character.
The Canadian tennis star famed for composure seemed to lose it for a moment after winning a bronze medal with his mixed-doubles partner, Gabriela Dabrowski.
As their match on Friday ended, Auger-Aliassime began to hop in place like a kid waiting on his presents.
“Usually, you have to keep a serious face,” Auger-Aliassime said afterward. “But this is a game of big emotions.”
The Canadians defeated the Dutch pair of Demi Schuurs and Wesley Koolhof 6-3, 7-6 (2). This is the first tennis medal for Canada since Daniel Nestor and Sebastien Lareau won doubles gold at Athens 2000.
“It’s amazing to do it for your country,” Dabrowski said afterward. “What does ‘do it for your country’ mean?”
She then proceeded to give a kind of symposium on the immigrant experience and what the Olympics means to people who want to fit in. By the time, it ended, Auger-Aliassime was rapt.
“Amazing answer,” he said. “I don’t want to stop you.”
As much as what had happened on the court, it was a moment.
For all the talk of Canada’s overlapping golden tennis generations, you don’t see that much of them.
They’re there if you’re on top of it early in big tournaments, but late returns have begun to dwindle. It’s a long time – the 2021 U.S. Open – since a Canadian made the semi-final of a major. That was Auger-Aliassime.
Most athletes don’t have a personality, they have a record. The better they are, the more interesting they become.
Auger-Aliassime has a personality. So while Canada loves all its tennis stars, you can feel it wanting to love Auger-Aliassime a little more equally than the rest.
That, not just the potential for medals, is what’s made Canada’s run at Roland Garros at these Games so exciting. Maybe we were watching the emergence of a new, though already familiar, national sweetheart on everyone’s favourite stage.
Last year, Auger-Aliassime beat one top-10 opponent. At these Olympics, he beat two in two days. Hard not to see the hand of fate behind those especially heavy forehands. That made Friday a big day for Canadian tennis.
Up first, Carlos Alcaraz on Philippe-Chatrier. Let’s just say there were two players together on the court, but they were living in different worlds. Alcaraz won 6-1, 6-1.
It was the sort of match that was so one sided that Alcaraz had the decency not to celebrate. He only raised his arms for a moment and then marched up to the net for a handshake.
As he left the court, Auger-Aliassime gave the mildest of waves. This Paris crowd had embraced him as a fellow Francophone and all-round good guy in the past few days, but not when he was facing the new king of Roland Garros. Long after the Canadian left, Alcaraz was still there knocking balls into the crowd.
Afterward, none of the usual double talk you get from most pros. Auger-Aliassime had just finished his 10th match in six days. Was fatigue an issue?
“I was happy with how I felt this morning,” Auger-Aliassime said. “I was ready to go. It’s just level wise.”
‘Level wise’ – that’s a hurtful thing for a professional athlete to say about themselves.
Auger-Aliassime didn’t look happy about it, but nor did he look defeated or, worse, resigned. Mostly, like everyone else here, he looked overheated.
The Alcaraz match ended just before 3 p.m. local time. Three hours later, Auger-Aliassime was back on the other show court, playing for bronze with Dabrowski.
If Auger-Aliassime is the guy who can’t quite get over the line, Dabrowski is the player who’s never been given the opportunity of a line to get over. Despite a remarkable career, including a U.S. Open doubles title, brand-name status has eluded her. So here were two Canadians in search of a moment.
Dressed identically, the Dutch pair were at first giving off that feeling of a tennis duo who have a strange mind-meld that makes the whole better than the parts.
But confronted with Auger-Aliassime’s top-tier serve and Dabrowski’s doubles instincts, that advantage dissipated. For the first while, Auger-Aliassime was a bit of a passenger, repeatedly looking over at Dabrowski for advice and assurance.
Midway through the first, the Canadian machine began to hum. They won the first set 6-3.
To give you some sense of the mood at Olympic tennis, they played Sweet Caroline during the break. It’s a cool thing to do in Boston, and just a weird thing to do in France, but the Roland Garros crowd loves it. The day a North American crowds starts sing-songing Emmenez-Moi is the day Euro types should be singing Neil Diamond.
But the French love it so much that when the song was cut off to resume the tennis, they first booed lustily, and then tried singing it through play. The umpire upbraided them. A few kept going.
It’s not exactly a temple of sport everywhere you go here in Paris. Some people are just determined to have a good time.
At this point, the Canadians’ performance became erratic. They had it in the bag, and then they started to give it back, and then they had it again, and then they really handed it back. But in the tiebreak, Canada could do no wrong.
When someone’s won US$13-million in prize money (Auger-Aliassime) or are regularly in Grand Slam finals (Dabrowski), you wonder whether a second-runner-up medal is going to mean that much. It did to these two. They could not contain their glee.
It wasn’t so much in what they said, as how they said it. Tennis is a game of losing. Unless you’re one of a very few people, your next loss is imminent. In that milieu, people are careful about over-celebrating their wins.
But some wins are too sweet not to embrace on their own terms, without qualification.