Gauff, Svitolina, Jarry and Kovinic ready to fly at Paris 2024
It’s a rare achievement to play tennis for your country in the Olympic Games but on Friday evening four tennis players will join an even more exclusive club.
Coco Gauff, Elina Svitolina, Nicolas Jarry and Danka Kovinic will all proudly fly the flag for their country at the Olympic opening ceremony, representing USA, Ukraine, Chile and Montenegro respectively.
Being an Olympic flagbearer is a significant honour and including Paris 2024, 33 tennis players have taken on the role since tennis was reintroduced as an Olympic sport at Seoul 1988.
Among them are Grand Slam champions Novak Djokovic, Stephan Edberg, Roger Federer, Goran Ivanisevic, Petra Kvitova, Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal, Jelena Ostapenko, Gabriela Sabatini, Maria Sharapova, Stan Wawrinaka and Caroline Wozniacki.
But this time the experience will be a bit different for Gauf, Svitolina, Jarry and Kovinic when the ceremony gets underway in Paris at 7:30pm local time.
The opening ceremony is always the glittering, spectacle-filled extravaganza that kicks off the Olympic Games, where the host city puts on its best show and athletes walk out with their national teams watched by millions of people around the world.
In Paris, for the first time in the history of the summer Olympic Games, the ceremony won’t take place in a stadium. The parade of 10,500 athletes will be held on the river Seine with boats for each national delegation, and the flotilla will sail on a six-kilometre route from east to west across the French capital.
It will finish in front of the Trocadéro, the iconic site opposite the Eiffel Tower which will be the backdrop for numerous events during the Games.
Gauff, the 2023 US Open champion who is making her Olympic debut in Paris, is the first tennis player to be a Team USA flagbearer and will share the role with basketball star LeBron James. Both were chosen by their fellow athletes, and Gauff received the news from fellow tennis player Christopher Eubanks.
“I wanted to cry when I found out,” she said, “but my whole team was there so I went in a corner and did it.”
It will be an emotional night too for Svitolina, who has proudly represented Ukraine throughout the nation’s ongoing conflict with Russia. Always at her best when playing for country, Svitolina was a bronze medallist at Tokyo 2020.
Jarry is “excited, happy, and proud” to fly the flag for Chile, and follows in the footsteps of Olympic gold medallists Nicolas Massu and Fernando Gonzalez. “These are going to be my first Olympic Games, and it means a lot to me. I think it is a dream for every athlete to carry the flag.”
As Montenegro’s only ranked tennis player, Kovinic is used to metaphorically flying the flag for her country, and on Friday evening she will get to do it for real alongside sailor Milivoj Dukic.