From golf course to tennis court
If it wasn’t for the late Dutch football legend Johan Cruyff, Stephane Houdet may never have become a multiple Grand Slam winning wheelchair champion.
Pairing up with Cruyff in a golf tournament in 2003, the former Ajax and Barcelona forward and coach suggested the now 47-year-old Frenchman should try his hand at wheelchair tennis.
Cruyff, a three-time European Footballer of the Year who died in 2016, was the founder of the Cruyff Foundation, which partnered the Wheelchair Tennis Development Fund.
Houdet had been a talented junior tennis player before embarking on a career as a vet. In 1996, while on a motorcycle trip around Europe with a friend, Houdet was involved in a serious accident, which eventually led to the amputation of his leg eight years later.
When you fall so far down, as I did, you have only two options - you go back or you die
“When you fall so far down, as I did, you have only two options - you go back or you die,” Houdet told the website of the International Tennis Federation in 2013.
“You learn that when you are in a hospital and you are just trying to eat with a spoon and not miss your mouth because you cannot feed yourself. That’s what I was like but still I recovered. That gives you a peace within yourself.”
Following his accident, Houdet continued working as a vet, and also took up golf, where he soon became one of the stars on the World Golf Tour for the Disabled, which he helped develop alongside Cruyff.
In 2005, golf was left out of the Paralympic programme for the 2012 London Olympics, to Houdet’s great disappointment.
He decided to return to his old love, tennis.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Houdet went on to win four wheelchair Grand Slam singles titles, including the 2012 and 2013 Roland-Garros championships and the 2013 and 2017 US Open.
Although he hasn’t won a Wimbledon singles title (the event only started in 2016), he is a three-time doubles champion on the SW19 grass courts and the top seed with his French partner, Nicolas Peifer.