At the End of a Wild French Open, Alexander Zverev Wins His First Grand Slam in a Thriller

Reported by Vogue.

The 2025 French Open was already one for the archives before the men's final even began — rain delays, early upsets, human line judges sparking controversies that Hawkeye would have killed in five seconds, and temperatures brutal enough to warp your forehand mechanics from the stands. After all that chaos, the only certainty heading into Sunday was that a first-time champion would be crowned. What nobody quite anticipated was that we'd get five sets of operatic tennis before it actually happened.

Second seed Alexander Zverev of Germany — long notorious as the best player on tour to have never won a Grand Slam — faced Italy's Flavio Cobolli, a 23-year-old playing his first major final. According to Vogue, the celebrity row on Court Philippe-Chatrier included Lily Collins, Rami Malek, Salma Hayek, François-Henri Pinault, and Lenny Kravitz, plus a freshly crowned Mirra Andreeva — who won her own first Slam the day before — watching from the stands in bedazzled heart-shaped red sunglasses. The audience got significantly more than they paid for.

The Match That Refused to End Politely

Zverev bolted through the first set 6-1, which made the whole thing look like a coronation in progress. Cobolli had other ideas. He broke Zverev's serve in the second, leveled the match, and kept leveling it — trading sets until a fourth-set tiebreak descended into pure theater: 20-shot rallies, drop shots that barely kissed the line, both players practically appealing to a higher power between points. Zverev led 3-1 in the breaker; Cobolli reeled off four straight. Then came the moment: Cobolli, holding set point on his own serve, had a simple overhead smash at the net. He missed it wide. He recovered to win the set anyway, but the psychological damage was already done.

The fifth set was less a tennis match than an exhale. Zverev won it 6-1, then collapsed at the baseline in tears — the weight of a career-long question finally answered. The final scoreline: 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 6-7, 6-1. During the trophy presentation, Zverev addressed the court directly, acknowledging the 2022 moment when he tore ligaments in his ankle mid-match on the very same grounds, and the Slam final he lost there two years ago. "I've had the best moments of my life on these courts, and I've had the worst," he told the crowd. "This time, it's a happy ending."

Sometimes the narrative arc takes years to close — but when it does, it does it in five sets on clay, in front of Lenny Kravitz.

Read the original at Vogue.