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One half of the legendary Bhupati-Paes duo that conquered all there was on the Tennis Court, Leander Paes was born on this day in 1973. Little did his parents know that he would fulfil their dream of an Olympic Medal just 23 years later.
Born on 17th June 1973
Leander Paes is one of those very few tennis players who hold the Olympics in higher regard to Grand Slams. Why wouldn't he, according to him, he was conceived during the 1972 Munich Olympics where both his father and his mother represented the Indian Contingent.
Paes was born to Vece Paes and Jennifer Dutton, both of whom took the field in the Munich Olympics of 1972; Vece as a midfielder in the Hockey team and Jennifer as the point guard of the Basketball team.
Leander grew up on stories of those Olympic games that were passionately narrated to him by the two sports fanatics who raised him. As the son of two Olympians, he went to some of the most elite institutions in Calcutta such as La Martiniere and St. Xavier's College.
But he took to neither of his parents' sports, instead taking a liking to Tennis; and boy was he good at it! Paes won Junior US Open and Junior Wimbledon in 1991 before he went pro and rose to the number one spot in the Junior World Rankings.
At his first Olympics in Barcelona, he reached the quarter-finals of the Men's Doubles with Ramesh Krishnan.
After a moderately successful season in 1993, his form dipped for the next two years. In came Mahesh Bhupati in 1996 and brought with him a change in Paes' fortunes. The two of them didn't dominate as a pair just yet, but on the individual front, 1996 was a significant year for Paes.
Playing with an injured wrist, he won the Bronze medal against Fernando Meligeni and became the first Indian since 1952 to win an individual medal. He has proclaimed the game to be his best performance ever.
For his heroics on the court, he was awarded the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award of 1996.
When the duo of Bhupati-Paes began to click together, the latter shifted all his energies to the Doubles game, where he has emerged as one of the greatest to ever grace the court. A captain of the Indian Davis Cup team, he holds the record of the most doubles victories at the tournament.
His doubles record too is enviable by all measures- he has won 8 titles and reached the finals another eight times at some of the most prestigious tournaments in the world like Wimbledon, French Open and the US Open,
He achieved the coveted Career Grand Slam after winning the Australian Open in 2012 and with that, achieved almost all that he could. Seven years later, to everyone's shock, he announced that 2020 would be his last year as a professional but Covid-19 has postponed his plans of riding out into the sunset with glory for the foreseeable future.
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