A Puzzler in Paris: French Open or Roland Garros?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/sports/tennis/a-puzzler-in-paris-french-open-or-roland-garros.html

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PARIS — The American television network Tennis Channel had a studio last year next to the Place des Mousquetaires at this Grand Slam tournament. On the studio’s exterior wall was a large poster that read: French Open 2012. But on the same poster, there was also a smaller, circular logo that read: Roland Garros.

Just what name is a well-meaning tennis fan supposed to choose?

This has been a quandary for years, and the rise of search engines and social media is hardly making it easier. Twitter, with its 140-character limit for messages, is a new kind of arbiter, one that cuts to the chase. But with the tournament beginning on Sunday, you will find both names reflected over the next two weeks in the abbreviated hash tags #RG13 and #FO13.

It is a linguistic divide. French speakers call the tournament, not just the stadium in which it is played, Roland Garros. Native English speakers, despite repeated attempts to convert them, still overwhelmingly favor French Open.

But it is also a cultural divide: Europeans, with the exception of the British, strongly favor Roland Garros. So do South Americans, whose players have been major factors here through the years. French Open officials have long hoped that China — a late arrival to tennis fandom — would follow their lead. But they are increasingly bowing to the obvious.

“The studies we’ve seen tell us that the translation of ‘Roland Garros’ in China clearly demonstrates that it’s mission impossible,” said Edouard-Vincent Caloni, the communications and marketing director for the French Tennis Federation, which operates the tournament. “It’s a linguistic barrier not just a marketing problem. And if we’re talking about Chinese, who generally favor English as a second language, they are clearly going to use ‘French Open.”’

The identity issue was once considered an identity crisis by French Federation officials, who, at different stages of the 1990s and 2000s, aggressively encouraged the print and electronic media covering the tournament to use Roland Garros and only Roland Garros.

But the official line is softer now.

“I’d say we have a more practical vision of things,” Caloni said. “It’s a bit like the Parisians. They still say they go to the Place de l’Étoile even though the name is really Place Charles de Gaulle now.

“We know that tomorrow we are not going to say, ‘Stop calling us the French Open, call us Roland Garros!’ to two, three, five or eight million British fans who are crazy about tennis and to even more Americans. It doesn’t work like that in this era. The time of marketing dictatorship, of worldwide campaigns is a bit démodé. We have Internet, Facebook. We can’t take people for fools. And if they have decided to call it the French Open, in a sense, we should say, ‘So much the better.”’

But actions, for the moment, speak louder than diplomacy, and the tournament is continuing to emphasize Roland Garros on multiple fronts.

There is no official Twitter feed labeled “French Open,” only @rolandgarros in English and @rolandgarrosFR in French.

The official tournament Web site frenchopen.com was eliminated in 2008. What exists now is rolandgarros.com in English, French and Mandarin with, according to Caloni, about two-thirds of users opting for the English version.

He said frenchopen.com was terminated for legibility and self-defense. “The concrete reason for doing it was to avoid killing off ‘Roland Garros,”’ Caloni said.

Nonetheless, a few key strokes shows who is winning the numbers game. A search for “Roland Garros” this week on the French version of Google delivered 24.6 million results. A search for “French Open” delivered 1.25 <em>billion</em>.

But if English trumps French on the Internet, there are still small victories. If you search for “French Open” on Google, the first result that appears is a link to rolandgarros.com.

“That’s because we did a big job with the key words for the search engines,” Caloni said. “Two or three years ago, when we typed ‘French Open’ we sometimes got golf or other things even in a boutique in Nice or Cannes that sells men’s clothing. It was a bit of a mess.”

The rub is that Roland Garros, the French fighter pilot for whom the stadium is named, was not much interested in playing or watching tennis. He was a rugby player, one who was killed when his plane was shot down in 1918 near the end of World War I. Friends later requested that the tennis stadium be named for him when it was built to stage the 1928 Davis Cup final between the United States and France.

The French Open did not become open — accessible to professionals — until 1968. Until then it was known in English as the French Championships, which is much closer to its formal French name: Les Internationaux de France de Tennis.

The French preference for Roland Garros as an alternative name for the tournament happened gradually, according to Christophe Fagniez, a general director of the French Tennis Federation. But it accelerated in the 1990s as the event, under the leadership of the longtime federation president Philippe Chatrier, embarked on ambitious expansion and the promotion of the Roland Garros product line.

Chatrier, a former tennis journalist, was particularly eager to emphasize the link with tennis history and the French players René Lacoste, Henri Cochet, Jean Borotra and Jacques Brugnon, who were known as the Four Musketeers and who were behind the French tennis boom that led to the stadium’s construction in 1928.

“At first, we did not have a marketing approach; it was above all a sports event” Fagniez said.

Caloni said the dual identity of the tournament is not without a price. For now, he said, there is no such thing as a licensed product line labeled French Open, which means that fans in, for example, North America, Australia, Britain and British-influenced India have a dearth of merchandise bearing the tournament name they favor.

Caloni said that was costing the French Open market share in the United States compared with the other three Grand Slam tournaments: the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

But Caloni said the French federation was examining the possibility of starting a French Open line that would complement rather than compete with the Roland Garros line and probably be targeted at high-end consumers with the focus on luxury.

“The American market alone justifies it, but if we do it just for that I think it’s a bad thing,” Caloni said. “If we launch a French Open line, we should sell it also all over the world, and it should be different than what exists already.”

Meanwhile, for foreign visitors a choice remains to be made back at Roland Garros Stadium (that name, at least, all cultures can agree on).

“I use Roland Garros and French Open interchangeably on air,” said Chris Fowler, one of the lead tennis announcers for the American network ESPN.

Fowler does this despite ESPN labeling its coverage primarily as French Open coverage (it uses the round Roland Garros logo, too).

“I like the cultural context attached to the event’s official name,” Fowler said. “And I respect aviators.”