How well do you know tennis and the French Open, the year’s second Grand Slam tennis tournament? Go ahead and give this quiz a try:
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1st Round: Rafael Nadal won the Italian Open, his last tournament before the French Open, for his first title of 2019. When was the last time Nadal headed to Roland Garros without having won any titles that season?
a) 2015
b) 2010
c) 2005
d) Never.
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2nd Round: Whose name was misspelled on a trophy awarded at the French Open?
a) Simonne Mathieu
b) Philippe Chatrier
c) Suzanne Lenglen
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3rd Round: Naomi Osaka heads to Roland Garros seeking a third consecutive major championship. She won her first Grand Slam title at last year’s U.S. Open, then added her second at this year’s Australian Open. Who was the last woman to follow up her initial major trophy by collecting No. 2 at the very next Grand Slam tournament?
a) Venus Williams
b) Serena Williams
c) Jennifer Capriati
d) Maria Sharapova
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4th Round: Which Grand Slam tournament has gone the longest without the host country winning the men’s singles title?
a) Australian Open
b) French Open
c) Wimbledon
d) U.S. Open
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Quarterfinal: Where was 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams seeded at the 2018 French Open?
a) No. 1
b) No. 5
c) No. 16
d) She wasn’t seeded.
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Semifinal: How many of Roger Federer’s 30 Grand Slam final appearances have been at Roland Garros?
a) 1
b) 3
c) 5
d) 7
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Final: What was Simona Halep’s record in Grand Slam finals before she won the 2018 French Open championship?
a) 0-2
b) 0-3
c) 1-0
d) 1-1
e) 2-1
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ANSWERS
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1st Round: d. Nadal has arrived at Roland Garros with at least one title to his name every year since making his tournament debut in 2005. He seeks his 12th French Open championship this year.
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2nd Round: a. Mathieu, for whom the tournament’s newest court is named, won 13 Grand Slam titles: two in singles, nine in women’s doubles, two in mixed doubles. She is a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame. When the French Open women’s doubles trophy was named for her, Mathieu’s first name was engraved as “Simone.”
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3rd Round: c. Capriati won the Australian Open and French Open in 2001. She would go on to win one more Grand Slam singles title, at the Australian Open in 2002. Venus Williams also won her first two major titles back-to-back, at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 2000, then added a total of five more majors in singles.
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4th Round: a. Australia’s Mark Edmondson won his country’s Grand Slam tournament in 1976, seven years before Yannick Noah became the most recent Frenchman to lift the trophy at Roland Garros. Andy Roddick won the U.S. Open in 2003; Andy Murray famously ended a 77-year drought without a British male champion at Wimbledon in 2013.
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Quarterfinal: d. Williams - who owns three French Open titles as part of her record haul of 23 Grand Slam singles trophies in the professional era - was not given a seeding by the French Tennis Federation last year. It was her first major tournament in 16 months - she had missed time while pregnant and after giving birth to a daughter - and her ranking had gone from No. 1 to No. 453 when seedings were announced in Paris. Williams wound up beating women 11th and 17th en route to reaching the fourth round, but then withdrew because of an injured pectoral muscle.
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Semifinal: c. Federer returns to the tournament for the first time since 2015; it’s been a decade since his lone title in Paris, in 2009. He also reached the final in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2011, losing to Nadal in all four of those matches.
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Final: b. Halep was the runner-up at the French Open in 2014 and 2017, then at the Australian Open in 2018, before finally collecting her first major trophy at Roland Garros by beating Sloane Stephens in last year’s final.
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Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich
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More AP Tennis: https://www.apnews.com/apf-Tennis and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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