ROGER FEDERER THE BIOGRAPHY By René Stauffer Sportsbookofthemonth.com price: £12.99, saving £4.00 on rrp

RENE Stauffer, a sports writer since 1981, wrote his first biography of Roger Federer, The Quest for Perfection, in 2006.

Though the book was well received and updated on several occasions, such has been Federer’s astonishing longevity at the sport’s elite level that Stauffer believed a new biography, in which he would “start from scratch” was justified. Readers of this comprehensive biography will be inclined to agree.

The author first saw Federer emerge as a 15-year-old and has followed his career ever since, but the man who would become a tennis great and the oldest male to be officially recognised as world number one (beating André Agassi’s record by three years) was actually the latest in an impressive production line of talented Swiss tennis stars.

Stauffer traces Swiss tennis’s upward trajectory back to Heinz Gunthardt, who made the quarter-final at Wimbledon in 1985. It was an achievement which, while considered a shock at the time, “awoke Swiss tennis.”

Although injury forced Gunthardt to retire aged just 27, in his wake came Jakob Hlasek, the first Swiss to make the world top 10, Marc Rossett, an Olympic tennis champion in 1992, and the remarkable Martina Hingis, a Grand Slam winner at the age of 16.

Our story opens with Roger Federer losing the 2019 Wimbledon final, the longest in history, to Novak Djokovic in 2019. Five gruelling sets over an incredible 4 hours and 57 minutes had seen the Swiss great falter despite having two championship points.

His reaction at a press conference afterwards – when he could have been forgiven for offering one word, single-syllable answers (especially when he was reminded that something similar had happened 11 years earlier against Rafa Nadal) – sums the man up.

“I’m annoyed,” he said, “but you have to look forward, forget about it and take good things from it… I don’t want to be depressed for too long because of a great tennis match.”

It’s worth recalling that following a fiveyear break from the game, Federer had only returned to top-flight tennis in 2018; his comeback alone would have justified an updated biography, but René Stauffer has revised parts of his original, completely rewritten other aspects and added great swathes of new material to create the definitive tale of male tennis’s greatest exponent.