The French Open comes to a conclusion this weekend — and virtually every story about the tournament has referred to a man who had little to do with tennis.
That is Roland Garros, the French war hero after whom the Paris tournament’s main stadium is named.
In 1913, he became the first person to fly across the Mediterranean. During World War I, he was a pioneer of air warfare, shooting down four enemy planes with the help of his own invention: wedge-shaped steel plates attached to the propeller blades, which allowed for a forward-firing machine gun.