Unsung heroes

ALL eyes this weekend will be on the players at the finals of the French Open at Roland Garros Stadium. As the top tennis stars compete in what are often gruelling clay-court matches, spare a thought for those whose fitness, concentration and ball skills will go unnoticed: the ball boys and ball girls. They are approaching the end of three virtually uninterrupted weeks of long working days—in France, the country that invented the 35-hour working week.

The tournament does not lack volunteers for the job. It prides itself on a tough selection and training programme in order to provide excellence on the court. This year, it received 2,500 applications from aspirant ball boys and girls, all aged between 12 and 16 years, of whom 400 were invited to try out and 250 were taken.

Unlike at Wimbledon, which selects on sporting ability from local schools (and used to recruit from children’s homes), all of those who apply to work at Roland-Garros need to be members of the French Tennis Federation, and so are keen tennis players themselves. Applicants come from all over France, to avoid bias towards Paris. Ball boys and girls are evaluated daily on their performance, and promoted up or down a court accordingly. Like Wimbledon’s workers, but unlike the US Open’s (where adults can be recruited as ball boys), they are unpaid volunteers. The 250 fortunates get to see their idols up close, and watch the best tennis that clay-court championships offer in the world—although those allocated to jobs at the net at Roland-Garros are not allowed to let their eyes follow play, as they are at Wimbledon.

The curiosity is that, in a country that applies unyielding rules to matters of working practices or gender equality, the ball boys and girls put in hours that would ordinarily have France’s labour unions out on the streets. After one day off at the end of the qualifying week, they then work non-stop for 14 days, most of those requiring presence at the stadium for up to 11 hours a day.

What of France’s famous 35-hour week? David Portier, the head of the ball boys and girls at Roland-Garros, says that in reality, teams rotate during matches. So, he explains, “they work only up to four hours a day: the rest of the time is spent resting off the court”. They have plenty of time to wander about and watch matches. And the children get to keep their kit, as well as receive end-of-tournament gifts, thanks to the sponsors, as a reward.

As for gender equality, Roland-Garros operates a purely meritocratic system, unlike Wimbledon, which takes half girls and half boys. Since there are fewer applications in France from girls, says Mr Portier, fewer are selected: about a quarter of this year’s crop are girls. Few of them end up on centre court.

None of this has stirred any debate in France. So many teenagers are keen to take part, and their performance on the court is sufficiently excellent, that the system rolls on without complaint. But it is striking that a country that fines political parties that fail to field equal numbers of female and male candidates at elections, has a law to enforce a quota of women on company boards and does not hesitate to apply its labour code to adults is perfectly relaxed about what occurs on its premier clay courts.