Roland Garros is different from every other Grand Slam. Wimbledon rewards grass-court specialists. The US Open favors power and hard-court precision. The Australian Open is a test of fitness in January heat. But the French Open is something else entirely. The red clay of Roland Garros slows the ball down, raises the bounce, rewards heavy topspin, and punishes anyone whose legs or mental fortitude is not completely right on the day. It is the most physically demanding major, the most tactically complex, and historically, the hardest to dominate repeatedly. Which makes what happened over the last decade all the more extraordinary.

Ten years of Roland Garros men’s singles titles have been shared between just three players. Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Carlos Alcaraz. Three names. A combined total of titles that would be remarkable for a single player, let alone a generation. Nadal alone won six of the last ten titles before his retirement, extending a record at this tournament that nobody in the sport’s history has come close to matching. Djokovic managed to break through and win three times on a surface that gave him more trouble than any other. And Alcaraz, barely into his twenties, has already won the title twice back to back, announcing himself as the heir to the clay court throne with the kind of performances that make you wonder what the next decade at this tournament is going to look like.

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The last decade at Roland Garros is not a story about parity or surprise. It is a story about three of the greatest players who ever held a tennis racket taking turns reminding the sport who they are, on the most unforgiving surface in the game. Here is how it unfolded, year by year.

2015, Stan Wawrinka

The one year in this decade that belonged to someone outside the Nadal-Djokovic axis, and it was spectacular. Stan Wawrinka beat Novak Djokovic in the final 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4, denying Djokovic what would have been a career Grand Slam at the time. Wawrinka was one of the most dangerous one-week players in tennis, capable on his best days of beating anyone in the world, and his best days at Roland Garros in 2015 were genuinely exceptional. His single-handed backhand on clay is one of the great weapons the sport has produced, and he deployed it like a hammer throughout that fortnight. It remains his most celebrated Grand Slam title of the three he won in his career.

2016, Novak Djokovic

Djokovic had been knocking on the door at Roland Garros for years, reaching multiple finals and semi-finals without being able to close it out. In 2016, he finally did. He beat Andy Murray in the final 3-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 to complete the career Grand Slam, becoming the first man in the Open Era to hold all four major titles simultaneously. The relief and emotion from Djokovic when he held the trophy was unlike anything he had shown after a title before. Roland Garros was the one that had escaped him, and when it finally arrived, the weight of what it meant was visible on his face.

2017, Rafael Nadal

Nadal came back to Roland Garros in 2017 after injuries had kept him away, and he won the title without dropping a set across the entire fortnight. He beat Stan Wawrinka in the final 6-2, 6-3, 6-1, one of the most one-sided Grand Slam final scorelines in recent memory. It was his tenth French Open title, a number so extraordinary that most people had already stopped trying to find a comparison for it. Winning Roland Garros ten times is its own category of achievement, separate from anything else in tennis. He celebrated it quietly, which in hindsight felt appropriate. Even he seemed to understand that the number required a moment of stillness.

2018, Rafael Nadal

Nadal won his eleventh. He beat Dominic Thiem in the final 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 in a match that was closer than the scoreline suggested in the early stages before Nadal’s weight of experience and clay court mastery took over completely. Thiem was one of the few players of his generation who could genuinely trouble Nadal on clay, and he pushed hard in the first set, but the outcome was never really in doubt once Nadal settled. Eleven French Open titles at this point was so far beyond anything anyone else had achieved at a single Grand Slam that the sport had essentially stopped looking for context and started simply watching in appreciation.

2019, Rafael Nadal

The twelfth. Thiem again in the final, again unable to stop him. Nadal won 6-3, 5-7, 6-1, 6-1 in a match that followed a similar pattern to 2018. Thiem took a set and pushed Nadal harder than most opponents could manage on this surface, but from the third set onward there was only one direction the match was going. Twelve French Open titles made Nadal the most successful player at a single Grand Slam in the history of the sport. He held that record and kept adding to it.

2020, Rafael Nadal

The pandemic had pushed the 2020 French Open to October, played in cold, slow conditions that most players found difficult to adapt to. Nadal found them perfectly suited to his game. He beat Novak Djokovic in the final 6-0, 6-2, 7-5, one of the most dominant performances ever produced in a Grand Slam final against a player of Djokovic’s quality. The 6-0 opening set against the world number one in a Grand Slam final is a scoreline that belongs in a different category from normal tennis results. Thirteen French Open titles. The record had become genuinely untouchable.

2021, Novak Djokovic

Djokovic produced one of the great comeback performances in Grand Slam history, losing the first two sets to Stefanos Tsitsipas before winning three straight to take the title 6-7(6), 2-6, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4. It was his second Roland Garros title and it completed a second career Grand Slam, making him one of only two men in history alongside Rod Laver to win all four majors at least twice. Tsitsipas had played magnificently for two sets and had the crowd behind him, but Djokovic’s ability to raise his level when facing elimination is one of the defining qualities of his career, and he demonstrated it as clearly as he ever has in that final.

2022, Rafael Nadal

The fourteenth. Nadal came to Roland Garros in 2022 with a chronic foot injury that had threatened his entire season and was openly uncertain about his future in the sport. He won the title without losing a set in the final, beating Casper Ruud 6-3, 6-3, 6-0. Fourteen French Open titles is a record that existed so far beyond what anyone else had achieved at a single Grand Slam that the sport had no framework for discussing it anymore. Nadal simply held it, quietly, in Paris, on the court he had made his home more completely than any player in history.

2023, Novak Djokovic

Djokovic won his third Roland Garros title, beating Casper Ruud in the final 7-6(1), 6-3, 7-5 in a performance of controlled excellence. It was his 23rd Grand Slam title overall, breaking the all-time record he had previously shared with Nadal. The significance of the number was not lost on anyone watching. Djokovic had arrived at Roland Garros needing one more major to stand alone at the top of tennis history, and he delivered it on the surface that had given him the most difficulty across his career. That made it feel like the most complete achievement of the lot.

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2024, Carlos Alcaraz

Everything changed in 2024. Alcaraz beat Alexander Zverev in the final 6-3, 2-6, 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 in a match that was genuinely contested before Alcaraz’s physical superiority and competitive intensity took over in the fourth and fifth sets. He became only the third man in the Open Era after Bjorn Borg and Rafael Nadal to win Roland Garros before the age of 22. He had won Wimbledon in 2023 and 2024, the US Open in 2022, and now the French Open. Three different Grand Slams on three different surfaces before his 22nd birthday. The sport had found its next great champion, and he was already showing what that was going to look like.

2025, Carlos Alcaraz

Alcaraz defended his title in the most dramatic fashion possible, beating Jannik Sinner in a five-set final that went to a deciding tiebreak, 4-6, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(3), 7-6(2). It was the highest quality final Roland Garros had produced in years, two of the best players in the world exchanging the lead across nearly four hours of tennis before Alcaraz held his nerve in the final tiebreak. Back-to-back Roland Garros titles before the age of 23, alongside Wimbledon and US Open victories, made the conversation around what Alcaraz might eventually achieve at this tournament entirely legitimate. The torch had been passed, slowly and then suddenly, and the clay court era now had a new name at the top of it.

The 2026 edition, with Alcaraz withdrawing due to a wrist injury, opens the door for Sinner and others to write a new chapter. But the decade just completed belongs to those three names, and it will be a long time before anything matches what they produced on the red clay of Paris.