“A churning stomach I don’t usually have”: the stress, and the wonder, of Flavio Cobolli’s first Grand Slam final
n his first Grand Slam final, Flavio Cobolli experienced everything for the first time: the churning stomach on waking, the retreat into isolation before walking on court, then a five-set defeat to his friend Alexander Zverev. At 23, the Italian chooses to see a beginning.
Flavio Cobolli, Roland-Garros 2026 | © M. Baucher / Psnewz
Flavio Cobolli lived his first Grand Slam final as a procession of firsts, and was strikingly honest about what the occasion did to him before, during and after a five-set defeat to his friend Alexander Zverev at Roland-Garros.
It began with his body, before he had hit a ball. The nerves had been building for a fortnight, he said, but the morning of the final brought something new. “I woke up very nervous, with a churning stomach, which I don’t usually have,” Cobolli said. “I had to fight to face it.” He had slept more than expected, then woken into a state he wasn’t used to managing.
The tension was such that he had to withdraw from the very people who had come to support him. “Even my girlfriend could barely speak, I had to leave, because they were making me nervous,” he said. “So I isolated myself.” By his own account he saw almost no one before walking out onto a full Court Philippe-Chatrier.
Cobolli “not used to this pressure”
Cobolli, the soon-to-be World No.10, was clear-eyed about why the match began badly, pointing to the simple fact of inexperience. “I’m not yet used to this kind of pressure,” Cobolli said. “It’s not easy to enter a Slam final and immediately perform at your best, so I needed time”. This time, he felt, that his more seasoned opponent did not require on what he called “the match of his life.” The first set was lost 6-1.
Late on, depleted after a fortnight that had taken him through five-set battles and a four-day wait for the final, his legs cramped and gave way.
I never expected in all my life to become this kind of person, and I’m so proud of myself.
And yet he rejected, flatly, any suggestion of having been overawed. “I have never felt inadequate in my life, especially today,” he said. “What I did, no one gave me.” There was pride in a run nobody had foreseen: “I never expected in all my life to become this kind of person, and I’m so proud of myself.”
Asked for the three images he would carry from the fortnight, Cobolli reached past the defeat. He named the trophy; “the moment Matteo (Arnaldi) told me he wouldn’t go on court (for the semi-final), because it was a bit of a shock” and the quarter-final win over Félix Auger-Aliassime, “where I realised I’d done something big.”
At 23, in his first Grand Slam final, he framed the loss not as a ceiling but a threshold. “For me it’s not done – it’s only the start. I’m still young,” he said. “When you reach the first final, why not the second?” Before Roland-Garros, his best Grand Slam result was a quarter-final at Wimbledon, where the next edition begins in three weeks.
