Players Who Won A Grand Slam Without Dropping A Set In This Decade
Winning a Grand Slam title is hard enough. Winning a Slam without dropping a set is, even more, harder. It is a feat that has occurred only on a handful of occasions in the Open Era.
It has happened six times at the French Open, and twice each at the Australian Open and Wimbledon while remarkably no US Open champion has gone all the way without dropping a set since tennis opened its doors to professionals in the summer of 1968.
The Australian Open and the French Open have each been witness to 4 straight-set finals during the decade that was 2010 to 2019. The corresponding numbers at Wimbledon and the US Open during the same period are respectively two apiece.
Let us find out on which of these 11 occasions (sans 3 at the US Open) produced a Grand Slam champion who did not drop a set en route to the title.
Rafael Nadal: 2010 French Open
In his 6th appearance at the French Open in 2010, Nadal lifted his 5th title of the tournament.
In the process, the Spaniard became the sixth player in the Open Era to win a Grand Slam 5 or more times. As if that was not remarkable enough, Nadal did not drop a set at the clay-court major for the second time in three years.
The first player to win all 3 clay court Masters 1000 tournaments in a season displayed little signs of exhaustion on the Terre battue of Paris. In his first 4 matches at the tournament, Nadal was stretched beyond 4 games only once.
Nadal then saw off compatriot Nicolas Almagro in straight sets, two of them being tiebreaks, before beating fellow southpaw Juergen Melzer also in straight sets to arrive in his 5th title match. In the final, Nadal beat returning finalist Robin Soderling for the loss of ten games to lift his 5th French Open title.
In the process, Nadal emulated Borg as the only players to win multiple times at Roland Garros without dropping a set during the entire tournament.