Alexander Zverev: Does His French Open Win Matter?

Alexander Zverev is a Grand Slam champion. The German defeated Italy’s Flavio Cobolli in a dramatic five-set final at Roland Garros on Sunday, winning 6-1 4-6 6-4 6-7 6-1 on Court Philippe-Chatrier for his first career Grand Slam title. After racing through the opening set 6-1, he was pushed to the limit by a resilient Cobolli before eventually closing it out in five.

“Now, finally, it’s a happy ending,” he said, a line that will resonate differently depending on who is reading it, and why. After three Grand Slam final losses and years of accumulating the reputation of a player who could not win the big one, he won the big one. The trophy is real. As is the achievement. And the discomfort that followed the celebration, for a good portion of the watching public, is real too.

Alexander Zverev: An unpopular French Open winner?

To understand why a significant number of people were not rooting for Zverev on Sunday, you need to understand what has followed him through his career off the court.

In November 2020, Zverev’s ex-girlfriend Olga Sharypova accused him of repeated emotional abuse, culminating in at least two alleged physical altercations, one in a New York hotel before the 2019 US Open, and one in Geneva during the Laver Cup shortly after. Zverev denied all of Sharypova’s allegations and obtained a legal injunction against her and the journalist who published the story.

The ATP commissioned an investigation in October 2021, carried out by third-party investigators with over 60 years of combined experience, which conducted extensive interviews with both Sharypova and Zverev and 24 other individuals. After 15 months, the investigation concluded with a finding of insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations, and no disciplinary action was taken.

A separate case involving another former partner, Brenda Patea, resulted in Zverev being fined by a German court, though the couple eventually settled without Zverev admitting any guilt and maintaining his innocence.

The ATP’s handling of the matter satisfied almost nobody. Women’s rights advocates and a meaningful portion of the tennis public felt the investigation was structurally inadequate and that a governing body with no domestic abuse policy prior to these allegations, investigating one of its most commercially valuable players, was not an institution in a position to deliver a credible verdict. That criticism was and remains legitimate. The investigation did not exonerate Zverev – it concluded by finding that the available evidence was insufficient to take disciplinary action. Those are not the same thing, and that matters.

So when the confetti fell on Philippe-Chatrier on Sunday evening and the cameras cut to a celebration that the broadcast framed as one of tennis’s great redemption stories, a portion of the audience felt something considerably less warm. That reaction is honest and it deserves to be recorded as part of this story.

Why Zverev’s Win Matters

Sunday’s proceedings were not entirely comfortable to watch because of what the celebration implicitly signalled which is a sport moving on, closing a chapter, wrapping a complicated man in the uncomplicated language of triumph. That discomfort is a correct reading of how sport handles these situations. It almost always prioritises the winner’s narrative.

But sport is not alone in this. One need only look around at the figures celebrated in music, film, politics and business to understand that the relationship between achievement and character is not linear. Flawed people are admired. Accused people win awards. The question of how to hold both truths at once, this person has done something worth celebrating, and this person may have done something deeply wrong, is not one that sport invented, and sport is not uniquely equipped to answer it. That does not make the discomfort go away. It simply puts it in an honest context.

Within that context, there are threads of Zverev’s story worth pulling on, threads that deserve to be part of this conversation and have been largely crowded out by the noise around his controversies.

Zverev was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was three years old. For years, he hid it completely, never checking insulin levels in public, never injecting on court, always disappearing to bathrooms to manage his condition in private. He was told as a child that competing at the highest level with diabetes was impossible. He competed anyway. He won an Olympic gold medal. He reached four Grand Slam finals. And on Sunday he won one of them, with a continuous glucose monitor on his arm and insulin in his system and a medical reality that most of his opponents have never had to navigate.

When he finally went public with his diagnosis in 2022, he said he wanted to show that it is possible. He launched the Alexander Zverev Foundation, which provides access to insulin and medical care for children with diabetes in developing countries and runs tennis and ski camps to encourage active lifestyles. He said he became upset when he heard that doctors were telling diabetic children they could not become professional athletes. “I don’t think you should set any limits for kids as it’s just not fair to them.”

That part of the story should be told. Never as a counterweight to the allegations against him but because a Type 1 diabetic winning a Grand Slam is genuinely significant, and thousands of young people with the same diagnosis will have watched Sunday’s final and taken something from it that has nothing to do with courtside drama or off-court controversy. As deeply flawed as he is, Zverev is a role model to some of those kids. The trophy in his hands will inspire people. That is a good thing, and it does not require the other difficult things to be untrue.

Neither Black nor White?

Here is what Sunday ultimately leaves us with. A governing body that had no domestic abuse policy until one of its stars was publicly accused of abuse, conducted an investigation that closed the case without convincing the people most directly concerned, and then watched its champion lift the trophy on the sport’s most prestigious stage. The ATP’s institutional failure in how it handled those allegations is documented. It does not disappear because the tennis was excellent.

And yet Zverev earned what he earned on the court over two weeks in Paris. He won every match he needed to win. He held his nerve in a fifth set when he had historically struggled to do exactly that. He did what diabetic children were told he could never do, and he did it at the highest level the sport offers.

Both of those things are true. The challenge, for tennis, and for all of us watching sport in 2026, is to resist the pressure to let one truth erase the other. They coexist whether we are comfortable with that or not. The sport moves on. The questions remain. That is, in the end, probably the only honest summary of Alexander Zverev’s career.

Main photo credit: Susan Mullane-Imagn Images