A terrific Olympics for proud Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime

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PARIS — The one-man Canadian tennis team walked off the court at Roland Garros late Saturday without the second Olympic medal he so desired and surely deserved.

There should be another prize of some kind waiting for Felix Auger-Aliassime. Something to wear around his neck. Something to show off. He was that deserving. He was that much the proud Olympian here.

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He was as great a Canadian in the past eight days as there has been at these Summer Games.

Auger-Aliassime played singles, doubles, mixed doubles — more than 20 hours of tennis in 11 matches over seven days — and succumbed in three sets in the bronze-medal match, being defeated by both Italian Lorenzo Muzetti and by exhaustion, both physical and mental.

On another giant day of Canadian accomplishment here, with swimmer Summer McIntosh winning her astounding third gold medal, with the Canadian men picking up two more swimming medals and the women’s eight winning a silver at rowing — we were all over the water this day — the country needed a break of some kind on the red clay at the famed stadium.

Auger-Aliassime, losing 6-4, 1-6, 6-3, battled about as hard as anyone could battle, with legs clearly wobbly, with attention to detail being beaten up by too many matches, and he now walks away from these Games today with an enormous sense of pride, accomplishment and the willingness to do this again four years from now in Los Angeles.

Before he ever played in an Olympics, he was an Olympic fan. He used to watch the Winter Olympics. “That was the big one,” he said. “The Summer Olympics weren’t as big for us.”

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It was in that part of the conversation Auger-Aliassime was told that the teenager McIntosh had won her third gold medal of the Games, and like anyone watching from home, he was smiling and excited by that news.

“Wow. That’s amazing,” he said. “She’s amazing. One of a kind. There was already a lot of hype about her in Tokyo … It’s amazing for a country like Canada to have someone like her.

“I remember as a kid, the Winter games were so amazing every time for Canada, the Summer Games were a little overlooked. We’re raising the bar (now) and playing better and better and getting more and more medals and I’m really happy for Summer. I hope she keeps on going like that.”

Auger-Aliassime heads back to Montreal to play in this week’s National Bank Open, and he understands how fortunate he is to be able earn a “very nice living” playing his sport. And it’s because of that, he will never say no to showing up for the non-paying Olympics.

Some tennis players haven’t shown such enthusiasm in the past, but on Sunday Novak Djokovic will play Carlos Alcaraz for gold in the men’s tennis final and that can’t do anything but great things for the Olympics.

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Auger-Aliassime did come away with a bronze medal in mixed doubles and he was playing Saturday night to be one of the few men in the history of the sport to come away with two medals from one Games. Had he not been broken in the eighth game of the third set, he might have won a second bronze.

But it was clear, almost from the beginning of the match to the end, that he was playing on fumes — and fumes that almost put him on the podium for the second time.

“My legs gave out a little bit,” said Auger-Aliassime. He wondered about some of his own decision-making as the match got longer. The ability to make crisp decisions with an exhausted body is a combination that worked against him after the more than 20 hours of play he had been part of here.

Some athletes can win an Olympic medal by sprinting for 10 seconds. Some teams win playing 14-minute games and get through. The entire trampoline competition is less than an hour. Every sport had its own nuance, being Olympian in its own way, but few ask as much as their athletes as tennis does. And that’s part of what Auger-Aliassime will take from this experience.

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“The Olympics is a few times in your life,” he said. “Every year, there’s a tournament in Washington or some other place.

“If you’re lucky to get this chance as a Canadian, that means something to me. That’s why I show up. That’s why I try and do everything I can when I’m part of this.”

You may not care much about tennis throughout most of the year. You may not pay a whole lot of attention to Felix Auger-Aliassime between Grand Slam events. You may or may not be a fan of tennis at all.

But as a Canadian, watching him, seeing how much he cares, seeing how much a mixed doubles bronze means to him, you have to appreciate who is he and what he wound up accomplishing here.

He goes home with a medal. He deserved more than one. He beat Daniil Medvedev and Casper Ruud in singles. His was an Olympics to remember.

ssimmons@postmedia.com
twitter.om/simmonststeve

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