One hundred years later, Olympic tennis has returned to Paris.

It is not quite in the same spot. The 1924 Olympic tennis tournament was held in Colombes, a northwestern suburb of Paris that was one of the hubs of those much smaller-scale Games.

Roland Garros Stadium, site of this year’s Olympic tournament, did not yet exist. It was constructed in a hurry and opened in 1928, just in time to provide a suitably grand setting for France’s defense of the newly won Davis Cup.

But the Olympic playing surface in 1924 and 2024 is the same: red clay. Tennis, then as now, is one of the most prominent sports in France, even if the French are surely hoping for a better result this time.

In 1924, the Americans swept the five events, led by teen prodigy Helen Wills and men’s star Vincent Richards, who each won gold in singles and doubles. Suzanne Lenglen, the charismatic Frenchwoman and reigning Olympic singles champion, had to withdraw because of illness and never got another chance to win gold.

Those were the last Olympics for tennis as a full-medal sport until 1988, when Philippe Chatrier, a Frenchman who was president of the International Tennis Federation, finally succeeded in bringing it back into the fold.

“One of the greatest satisfactions of my career,” Chatrier told me a few years before he died in 2000.

The center court at Roland Garros now bears his name, and it seems fitting, given his long quest, that Olympic medals are about to be won in the “Philippe Chatrier Court”.

“This place has been my life and my love,” Chatrier said when we spoke in his office at Roland Garros in 1993.

Chatrier wanted, in part, to expand tennis’s reach globally, as he had helped expand its reach in France as president of the French Tennis Federation. When he took over that post in 1972, there were 225,000 registered players in the country. Twenty years later, there were 1.3 million and during that same period the number of clubs in France increased from about 2,000 to about 10,000.

The thinking was that bringing tennis back into the Olympics would make it a priority for countries in the eastern bloc, like the former Soviet Union, which focused on Olympic success. The idea was also to raise tennis’s profile in developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas where governmental support was often linked to Olympic participation.

It has certainly not played out quite like Chatrier imagined: the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. Other sports like football and basketball have expanded their international presence exponentially, taking up more air and media space.

It has not always been an easy road with a packed, season-long itinerary and lots of other peaks for tennis players to climb. But the Olympics have a role to play in the growth of the sport and, as anyone could see on Friday night, in the Opening Ceremony, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams and Amelie Mauresmo all played prominent roles in the final phase as they carried the torch on land and river through the rainy French capital.

Tennis, despite resistance, has benefited from its Olympic reconnection.

When it returned as a full medal sport, there were 104 nations affiliated with the International Tennis Federation with 51 of those taking part in Davis Cup. There are now 213 member nations with 157 participating in Davis Cup as well as a record 138 nations in the Billie Jean King Cup this year.

There were 87 million tennis players worldwide in 2021, according to the most recent Global Tennis Data Report, and David Haggerty, president of the ITF, said at Thursday’s Olympic draw in Paris that the number of participants has since increased to over 100 million.

There are multiple factors behind those figures, but the Olympics are a part of the package.

“For my country, it’s really important, because sometimes people in Ukraine don’t know what is a Grand Slam, but they know what is the Olympics,” Elina Svitolina told me on Thursday.

Svitolina became the first Ukrainian tennis player to win an Olympic medal: taking a bronze in singles in Tokyo in 2021.

“To be the first one to write that history in tennis in Ukraine is something really special,” she said. “So, I would value it maybe even bigger than a Grand Slam for me. My WTA Finals victory was pretty high, but the Olympics for me was I think one step bigger.”

Not all tennis stars would agree, of course. The Olympics, staged amid a packed tennis calendar, can be a logistical challenge, usually coming between Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.

Unlike many Olympics sports, tennis players have four opportunities each year to reach the pinnacle with the Grand Slam tournaments.

But the Olympics, staged every four years, are also precious because they are rare and because of the community that comes with them. They are on many players’ short list of experiences even without prize money or ranking points.

There have been big-surprise champions who peaked at the Games: singles gold medalists Marc Rosset in 1992, Nicolas Massu in 2004 and Monica Puig in 2016.

There have been all-time greats who burnished their status: Steffi Graf completing the first and only Golden Slam in 1988, Andre Agassi surprising himself by winning in 1996, Nadal marking his rise to No. 1 with gold in 2008, Williams playing the most dominant tennis of her career to win her first singles gold and third doubles gold with sister Venus in 2012 on the grass of the All England Club; Andy Murray claiming his second consecutive singles gold medal in 2016 by holding off an inspired Juan Martin del Potro.

 “The Games are the most important sports event in the world,” Nadal said recently in an interview with L’Équipe, the French sports publication. “I think that they are different than everything else we experience. We have the great fortune to have a big tour where we earn a very good living and have all the comforts. But at the Olympics you experience the true sport, the day-to-day sport, the effort that comes from pure personal passion. You are no different than anyone else. I think the Olympics takes the athletes back to the basic principles of sport. I don’t think we, or at least we tennis players, can find this in any other event during the year.”

Nadal told L’Équipe that his two Olympic victories -- in singles in 2009 and in doubles with Marc Lopez in 2016 – were “on the same level” in terms of emotions as winning a Grand Slam title.

For champions who have won so often, such powerful sensations keep them coming back for more and also move them to use the Games as a finish line. Murray and Angelique Kerber will both retire after the Paris Olympics.

“It was always a dream when I was a kid to win a medal,” Kerber said. “When I won silver at Rio 2016, it was a dream come true for sure.”