Roland-Garros: The one-handed backhand, a gesture on the verge of extinction?

It's a refined gesture, held in high esteem by the purist, appreciated by the curious behind his screen. A stroke of aesthetics, magnified in its most modern version by Roger Federer or Richard Gasquet. With the Frenchman, retired from the courts forever since Thursday , the one-handed backhand is becoming a little rarer within the professional circuit.

This shot, once Rod Laver's signature stroke, the favorite weapon of John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Martina Navratilova, and Stanislas Wawrinka, seems to be following the same trajectory today as that taken by wooden rackets of the last century. "If you look, there are almost none left," observed the newly retired Gasquet, one of its rare ambassadors. The reality is implacable: among both men and women, the decline seems inevitable. There were still around fifteen enthusiasts in the Top 100 men in 2019. There were only eight die-hard tennis players left on the eve of the start of the French Open. And if we look closely at the updated WTA table, only three women among the top 100 use it: the Swiss Viktorija Golubic (81st), the German Tatjana Maria (85th) and the French Diane Parry (100th).

At Roland Garros this Sunday, there are only two players left, opening the round of 16: Germany's Daniel Altmaier and Lorenzo Musetti. The Italian, among the outsiders to win this year's Porte d'Auteuil, is one of only two players under 25 to represent a semblance of a future, along with France's Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard (32nd).

Musetti, 23, is above all an exception among the members of the top 10. He has, in spite of himself, revived an old tradition that had come to an abrupt halt in February 2024: at the time, no one-handed backhand was ranked in the top 10, a first since the creation of the ATP rankings in 1973. Half a century earlier, it was the opposite: only one player among the world's top ten, Jimmy Connors, played with a two-handed backhand. Connors, with the help of Björn Borg, has helped reverse this trend over time.

Today, the one-handed backhand owes its last gasps to a player whose standing has helped bring it back into the spotlight: Roger Federer. The Swiss legend has encouraged Canadian Denis Shapovalov and Stefanos Tsitsipas , the 2019 Roland-Garros finalist, to familiarize themselves with this shot. American Christopher Eubanks even decided to remove one hand from his backhand at the age of 13, after watching Federer shine.

A silky mechanism, blessed by photographers, when the hip tilts and the arm deploys like a slap, or suddenly snaps back, so as to spin the ball and force the opponent to pick it up without taking it out of bounds. With this weapon, the possibilities are legion. However, "it is normal that we see less and less of it," assures Lorenzo Musetti. In today's tennis, "there is no one-handed backhand that can compete with an average two-handed backhand, in terms of return and ease of play," adds the Italian.

He points to changes in the game, marked by increasingly powerful shots. This makes it much more difficult to handle, and therefore less effective than before. "The speeds have increased so much compared to the 80s and 90s, when there were more opportunities to use variations and serve-and-volley," explained the world number 8, in comments reported by the specialist media Ubitennis.

"It's easier to hit two-handed backhands, technically, when you're starting out in tennis," Richard Gasquet told us before his final hurrah in Paris. When you're a child, putting an extra hand on the handle allows you to better control your racket, which is quite heavy despite increasingly lighter models at those ages. Once you've gotten used to it, there's little point in switching back to one hand. No coach will argue for that, unless you have a truly catastrophic two-handed backhand.

Another virtuoso of the genre, Stan Wawrinka, began to master this shot at the age of 11, following the advice of a coach who found his two-handed backhand unnatural. The 40-year-old Swiss, who is also not eternal, also concedes that playing with two hands is more "logical" because the second hand provides more security. But "the one-handed backhand brings other advantages" such as "the opportunity to use angles a little more and to have a more natural slice," the 2015 Roland-Garros winner explained at the start of the tournament. And don't talk to Wawrinka about a gesture that is on the way out: "I think there will always be one-handed backhands, no matter what," the Swiss insisted. "There always will be."