The fourth was the right one: at the end of the suspense, world number 3 Alexander Zverev ended up winning his first Grand Slam title at Roland Garros, Sunday June 7, 2026, after three failures in the final of major tournaments.
Born a year after the last victory of a German player in a Grand Slam (Boris Becker at the 1996 Australian Open), the 29-year-old won in five rounds and 4 hours 16 minutes of play against the Italian Flavio Cobolli (14th) to close an edition which defied all predictions.
The ghosts of two missed Grand Slam finals
More resistant to the heat than world number 1 Jannik Sinner, victim of a major failure in the second round, more authoritarian against the young guns of the circuit than Novak Djokovic (4th), knocked out in the third round by Joao Fonseca (29th), Zverev was the only contender to hold his rank until the end in Paris.
Better entering the match than an undoubtedly tense Cobolli for his first Grand Slam final at the age of 24, the Hamburger gave his opponent the break at 3-3 in the second set, committing a double fault and a gross fault on the forehand.
A few games later, Cobolli was quick to equalize at one set. The ghosts of Zverev’s first two Grand Slam finals (US Open 2020 and Roland-Garros 2024), lost after leading by one or two sets, suddenly resurfaced on the sun-drenched Parisian Central.
Imperial in service
Once again imperial in service, the German however regained control of the match in the third set. Threatening on almost all of Cobolli’s service games, the German ended up finding the opening at 5-4 in his favor, on a forehand in the Italian’s lane.
A year and a half after his last major final, lost in three sets against Jannik Sinner at the Australian Open, Zverev’s arm shook again in the fourth act. Broken twice, he managed to come back together each time, before cracking in the tie-break, an exercise in which he nevertheless excelled at Roland-Garros (26 decisive games won in Paris for 2 lost before the final).
4:16 a.m. of match
On a thread since the middle of the fourth set, Cobolli suddenly gave in in the decisive set, where he quickly fell 4-0. After 4 hours 16 minutes, the German colossus finally concluded, immediately falling backwards on the Parisian ocher where he had torn several tendons in his right ankle in 2022 against Rafael Nadal.
The first German winner in Paris since Henner Henkel in 1937, Zverev joins in the history books the American Andre Agassi, the Croatian Goran Ivanisevic and his Austrian winner from the 2020 US Open Dominic Thiem, who like him had lost three Grand Slam finals before winning their first major tournament.
Targeted for several years by accusations of domestic violence made by two ex-partners, which he has always denied to the point of filing defamation suits, the right-hander will undoubtedly never be as popular as his traditional tormentors Sinner, Djokovic or Carlos Alcaraz (2nd in the world, withdrawn from Paris due to a right wrist injury).
And even if Sunday’s final was mainly characterized by peaks of nervousness, a year after the tennis summits offered in Paris by Alcaraz and Sinner, Zverev probably doesn’t care: on the threshold of thirty, the German has finally joined the circle of Grand Slam winners.
