Jean-Paul Loth, former captain of the French Davis Cup team from 1980 to 1987, also has memories of this covering. Bitters. Since this lost meeting (3-2) in Asuncion in 1985. “The Paraguayans assigned us a training room with an untreated parquet floor because the competition site was not accessible (the Alfredo Stroessner Stadium, built for the occasion and named after the then president). It was a normal parquet floor, so playable, because you still had a little grip. The thing is, we never saw our opponents training. They told us that they came at odd times. Except that in fact, they were playing elsewhere, on sealed parquet, the real competition surface, which goes much faster. It is very complicated to reassemble a sliced ball on this. It’s as if we had trained on the grounds of Roland-Garros only to find ourselves on covered ground that had not been watered for eight days. A trap. »
