Lenglen suffered from asthma as a child and her father Charles encouraged her to take up tennis thinking it would boost her stamina. It did.
She once went 181 straight matches without a defeat.
She was just 15 when she became world champion on clay in Saint Cloud stadium near Paris in 1914.
During her short 12-year career she won a total of 241 titles, including six at Wimbledon – five consecutively from 1919 to 1923 – and nine French Opens in Paris.
To say she dominated international tennis in the 1920s would be an understatement.
The French press couldn’t get enough of her and she quickly became a national treasure. After the bloodshed of WW1 France was in need of a hero to restore some national pride. Lenglen fit the bill – perfectly.
Crashing into Wimbledon
Her big moment came in 1919 when, aged 20, she took on seven-time Wimbledon winner Dorothy Lambert Chambers in front of a crowd of 8,000, including King George V and Queen Mary.
Struggling in the early stages, Lenglen came back to defeat Chambers 10-8, 4-6, 9-7, becoming the first non-English speaker to take the Wimbledon title.
Her victory set shock waves through the stalls, as did her explanation to the British press as to how she’d pulled it off.
In an article entitled Mon match le plus émouvant (My most moving match) she admitted to feeling “obliged” to lean on a little Dutch courage to give her a temporary boost. She sipped cognac from a hip flask.
Encouraged by her father, Lenglen’s little tipples would become a regular fixture between changeovers.
‘All the power of a man’
Suzanne Lenglen was a natural athlete and excelled in many sports. A Pathé documentary in 1933 lifted the lid of some of her technique, honing in on her powerful wrist action, showing her training on a half-sized court to boost her accuracy at high speed. And playing against a wall to increase her speed.
“She hits with all the power of a man,” commentator Charles Eade said. “But it was her accuracy in placing a ball out of her opponent’s reach that made her invincible in tournament play.”
She denied she had a special method of play. “I just throw dignity to the wind and think of nothing but the game,” she said in an interview. “I try to hit the ball with all my force and send it where my opponent is not.”
Epitome of the roaring 20s
Performance was as important as competition and Lenglen loved to “look good”, dancing around the court with the grace and allure of a ballerina on amphetamines.
During the Belle Epoque it had been considered unseemly for women to play sport, but Lenglen came into her own in the roaring 20s, alongside the creation of the women’s sports federation.
Habillée par Patou qui en fait l’une de ses égéries, Suzanne Lenglen incarne la femme libre et indépendante. Ni épouse, ni mère, elle démontre que la pratique sportive peut jouer un rôle important dans l’émancipation des femmes et la libération des corps. pic.twitter.com/upi2YB72GV
— Nejma Omari (@NejmaOmari) May 24, 2021
Keen to look her best she would often come to court in full make-up, dressed in long furs.
In 1921, she asked French designer Jean Patou to come up with an outfit. And that gave birth to the Lenglen look: low neckline, no corset, pleated skirt above the knee, short-sleeved polo shirt and a silk bandana.
Showing her bare arms and legs, she embodied the tennis world’s response to the flapper generation. While Lenglen’s counterparts across the Channel were still in long skirts, she had freedom of movement.
She remained an independent woman throughout: single and child-free, four decades before the women’s lib movement made that less shocking.
First professional tennis player
In 1926, Lenglen beat triple US champion Helen Wills in the “match of the century”, sealing her reputation as the world's most famous female tennis player.
But the increasingly-diva French star caused an upset at Wimbledon four months later when she refused to take part in a couple of matches she was required to. She opted to break away from Wimbledon – where only amateurs could play at the time – and go professional.
"Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete...Is that fair?"
In an interview to the British press, quoted in a biography by US writer Larry Engelmann, she argued the “art for art’s sake” philosophy didn't make sense in sport.
"Under these absurd and antiquated amateur rulings, only a wealthy person can compete, and the fact of the matter is that only wealthy people do compete. Is that fair? Does it advance the sport? Does it make tennis more popular – or does it tend to suppress and hinder an enormous amount of tennis talent lying dormant in the bodies of young men and women whose names are not in the social register?"
Still statuesque
Lenglen retired from tennis aged just 28 but she had several strings to her racket. She went on to sell sportswear, designed some shorts for women, was a published writer and ran a tennis school for children in Paris.
She died of “pernicious anaemia” in 1938, aged 39 and was posthumously made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. She remains a monument of French tennis and a statue of her “in full swing” stands above the Roland Garros court that bears her name.
