Roland Garros Stadium

The Roland Garros stadium complex is named after a man who had almost no connection to the sport of tennis. Roland Garros was a pioneering French aviator and a national hero during the First World War. He is remembered for performing the first solo flight across the Mediterranean Sea in nineteen thirteen and for inventing a mechanism that allowed a machine gun to fire through a plane's spinning propeller. The stadium was built in nineteen twenty eight to host France’s defense of the Davis Cup, and the venue's name was a condition set by the rugby club that donated the land, in honor of their former classmate who had died in combat a decade earlier.