CHASING THE MAGICAL 10

The number 10 has magic associated with it in sports. It is much revered in football where legends like Pele and Maradona used it, in gymnastics after Nadia Comaneci earned the perfect 10, and athletics, in which every 100m sprinter dreams of smashing it. If Rafael Nadal wins the 2017 French Open, the number 10 will be special for tennis players and fans alike.

It will be the first time a player will win a Grand Slam tournament 10 times in open era. Though Nadal has done that recently by winning both Monte Carlo and Barcelona 10 times, no one has dominated a top-level competition in any sports or on a particular surface in this manner.

If he claims his 10th French Open title, it will be one of the most outlandish feats not just in tennis but in the entire annals of sport. Nadal will eclipse Martina Navratilova’s (pic above) record of nine Wimbledon wins. He has already gone past the tally of seven Wimbledon titles achieved by both Pete Sampras and Roger Federer. The only single tournament

landmark then left to chase would be the 11 Australian Open singles titles of Margaret Court, but that was stretched across the amateur and Open eras between 1960 and 1973.

Such sustained dominance in a single event for so long has not been achieved in other major sports too. In golf, Tiger Woods has won the Arnold Palmer Invitation and WGC Bridgestone Invitational eight times. Sam Snead also won the Greater Greensboro Open eight times over a remarkable 27-year span between 1938 and 1965. The double digit mark has been achieved in less physically demanding sports like snooker in which Joe Davis won the first 15 World Championships between 1927 and 1946.

The only athlete who comes closer to Nadal in dominating a particular event is Jahangir Khan, the squash great from Pakistan, who won the British Open championship 10 times (between 1982 and 1991).