Stan Wawrinka’s tennis journey

For how much longer?

It is this simple, succinct question that is currently troubling Stan Wawrinka and his followers more than anything else. The 39-year-old Romand played his last match around three weeks ago at the US Open. Since then, things have been quiet again. Last week he cancelled his participation in the Challenger tournament in St-Tropez due to an injury. He was absent from the Swiss team’s Davis Cup match against Peru in Biel at the weekend. He told the French newspaper “Var-Matin”: “I don’t know when I’ll be able to play again.” Will he even come back?

Wawrinka is scheduled to compete in the Swiss Indoors in Basel at the end of October. But nothing is certain in his career. He has not won two matches in a row for a year and the 2023 US Open. The current season’s record is five wins and twelve defeats. He is still in 234th place in the ATP rankings.

Why does a three-time Grand Slam winner, who was once number 3 in the world, still do this? Anyone who wants to find an answer to this question must search for Wawrinka’s traces. It leads to the small Vaud municipality of St-Barthélemy.

St-Barthélemy is located not far from the A1 motorway, which connects Lausanne and the Lake Geneva Basin with the Espace Mittelland. According to the most recent survey from December 2023, the municipality has 829 inhabitants, most of whom commute to work in nearby Lausanne or earn their living in agriculture, which characterizes the region. There is nothing that could later remind a casual passerby of the inconspicuous village. The most striking building is the castle, Goumoens-le-Châtel, an old noble residence from the Middle Ages, which sits on a hill not far from the village center.

At the foot of the old castle walls lies a large farm, to which is attached the Fondation St-Barthélemy educational center. The facility offers a home to around eighty physically or mentally handicapped people. The home is the life’s work of Wolfram and Isabelle Wawrinka, Stan Wawrinka’s parents.

The parents flee to paradise

“Stan” grew up around the farm. Like other young people his age, he built huts on it, played and sometimes drove a tractor. In 2020, after a disagreement with the management, his parents moved to an inconspicuous little house in the municipality of Bettens, a stone’s throw away. They live there on a street with the picturesque name “En Paradis” and located directly behind the small cemetery.

There, Wolfram Wawrinka sits on his terrace on a sunny, windy late summer day and proudly talks about the youth of his son, who is now known around the world. As a professional tennis player, Stanislas Wawrinka has won three Grand Slam titles and a total of sixteen tournaments, as well as $37 million in prize money. Ten years ago, he rose to third place in the world rankings. His successes made him popular across the country, and in 2014, television audiences voted him Swiss of the Year. France’s state railway company SNCF hired him as a brand ambassador and named a TGV train after him.

“To be among the top three in the world in a global sport is no small achievement,” says Wawrinka’s father. His parents had seen early on that their son had two exceptional talents: he had an obvious talent for playing tennis and was also extremely persistent and ambitious. “When the coach asked him to run for an hour, Stan ran for an hour and a half,” says Wawrinka’s father.

 

Stan is the second oldest of four children of Wolfram and Isabelle Wawrinka. His brother Jonathan is three years older and has also collected a few ATP points. He reached his best ranking in 2003, when he was number 948 in the world. His statistics show a single match, a two-set loss to Belgian Yannick Mertens, then number 629 in the world. Today he runs a tennis academy in Lausanne that bears the Wawrinka name and undoubtedly benefits from his younger brother’s success.

Wawrinka’s father says Jonathan lacked his brother’s passion and determination. “And I know that he now regrets that he had not worked more determinedly on his career.” His two younger sisters, Djanaée and Naella, also showed talent for tennis. They now work in other fields.

Switzerland first became aware of the young Stanislas Wawrinka in 2003, when he won the Roland-Garros junior tournament at the age of 17. At the time, he was training with his long-time sponsor Dimitri Zavialoff in Lausanne. He later moved to Barcelona with the Russian-born Frenchman and his brother Jonathan, where the three found better and, above all, more affordable training conditions.

Wawrinka’s father says: “When Stan won the junior tournament in Paris, that was the first time we thought he could really become something. But even then we didn’t seriously expect his career to develop in this way.”

Stan Wawrinka was a late bloomer in many ways. For a long time he was on the tennis court more or less irregularly. While two of his great rivals, Roger Federer from Basel and Rafael Nadal from Mallorca, were already holding the racket regularly at the age of two and three respectively, he only started training seriously and honing his skills at the age of twelve. When he won the Australian Open in Melbourne in January 2014 as a complete outsider, he was already just under 28 years old, Federer was already a seventeen-time Grand Slam winner, had been at the top of the world rankings for almost ten years and was a global star.

For Wawrinka, who grew up and was socialized in the social environment of the Fondation St-Barthélemy, the shadow of the sophisticated Basel native was overwhelming for a long time. For years he was simply “the second Swiss” on the tennis tour, shy and reserved because he spoke only passable English and, despite his parents’ German roots, no German at all. Wawrinka lost 13 of the first 14 matches against his compatriot. His only victory came in April 2009 in Monte Carlo, when Federer was about to marry Mirka Vavrinec and his head wasn’t quite in the game.

Federer was not an obstacle, but the engine that drove Stan

The record has not fundamentally changed even after Wawrinka’s breakthrough as Grand Slam winner in Melbourne in 2014. It is 3:23. Wawrinka achieved his third and probably most significant victory over Federer in 2015, when he defeated the Basel native in three sets in the quarterfinals on his way to his second major title at Roland-Garros.

But Wawrinka never saw it as a handicap that he spent most of his career in Federer’s shadow. Together, the two won two titles that one of them could hardly have achieved alone. In 2008, they became Olympic doubles champions in Beijing, and six years later, in the autumn of 2014, they won the Davis Cup in Lille against France. Both times, Wawrinka was essentially the driving force on the court. And yet Federer was in the spotlight, at least internationally.

Wolfram Wawrinka says: “Roger was not an obstacle for Stan. He saw him more as a motor that drove him to achieve his best performances again and again. Stan was also always impressed by how Federer dealt with his successes and how he mastered the downsides of them.”

Wawrinka senior remembers his son’s first major victory in January 2014 in Melbourne. “We were sitting in his hotel room waiting for him. The award ceremony and the subsequent media appointments kept him on the course for hours. When he finally arrived at the hotel at three in the morning, he sat down in our room and said: ‘Dad, my life is going to change now. Nothing will be the same as it was before.'”

A success like this affects not only the athlete, but his entire family. International media suddenly became interested in Wawrinka and the unusual place he came from. His father Wolfram, his mother Isabelle and his three siblings were also suddenly people of public interest.

This is one of the main reasons why Wolfram Wawrinka is sitting in the family’s tranquil garden in Bettens on this September afternoon and talking about the youth of his son, who has become a world star. But it has never become a burden, says Wawrinka senior. “We have also benefited from it. We travel more today than we used to. We were there for all three of our son’s Grand Slam victories. 2014 in Melbourne, 2015 in Paris, 2016 in New York.”

Recently, Wawrinka’s father met the other famous offspring of the farming village of St-Barthélemy during a walk in the village: Lucien Favre, the former midfield strategist of Servette and the national football team, who later became a top coach in the German Bundesliga and the French Serie 1. Like Stan Wawrinka, Lucien Favre has experienced not only the sunny side of success, but also the dark side.

Wawrinka’s father and Favre went to school together. Over a coffee recently, they exchanged memories of how Stan had hammered tennis balls against the same wall where Lucien Favre had practiced his free kicks and honed his shooting technique a few decades earlier.

The parents would like to go to the Australian Open again

It is unusual for a farming village like St-Barthélemy to produce two athletes of international renown. This makes it all the more painful for the father to have to watch as his son is repeatedly advised to retire. Stan Wawrinka is 39 years old and will turn 40 on March 28th next year. He is already the oldest player active on the ATP tour.

Wawrinka is still benefiting from a so-called protected ranking, which opens the door to the big tournaments for him. But if he doesn’t use it soon and start winning again, the free fall in the rankings will continue. Wolfram Wawrinka hasn’t given up hope yet. He and his wife would like to fly to the Australian Open again to see his son play in Melbourne. The place where Stan Wawrinka’s great era began almost eleven years ago.

Wawrinka’s father says: “From the outside, it’s easy to say he should stop. Stan’s hunger is still there. He gets his passion from his mother, and he gets his strength from me. Stan has a huge passion, and that’s what makes him so popular. Why shouldn’t he keep playing as long as he still wants to?”

That’s a good and legitimate question. A year ago, Stan Wawrinka said in his last major conversation with the NZZ that he still had a thousand plans in his head. Stan remains Stan. Ambition and the ability to ignore others and follow his own instincts have turned him from a shy boy from St-Barthélemy into a three-time Grand Slam winner. He has every right to enjoy the last phase of his career for as long as possible. Even if he only loses.