🇮🇳 Leander Paes

Leander Adrian Paes was born on 17 June 1973 in Kolkata to a sporting family of extraordinary depth: his father Vece Paes had won an Olympic bronze with the Indian field hockey team at the 1972 Munich Games; his mother Jennifer Paes had captained the Indian women's basketball team. Tennis was, in Vece's framing, a 'safer game with a longer career window' than the family hockey heritage. The Paes home in Kolkata, with three sporting members in the senior generation, became — by Vece's deliberate design — a household where Leander was treated like a junior athlete from age four. He had been ranked junior No. 1 in the world at 17. He had won the Junior Wimbledon and the US Open junior titles at 18. He was on the senior India Davis Cup team at 18.

The Atlanta 1996 Olympic bronze is the central event of his early career. He was a 23-year-old wild-card entrant whose singles ranking that summer was outside the top 100; his run to the bronze medal involved beating the 4th seed Tomás Carbonell, the 7th seed Renzo Furlan, and the world No. 16 Fernando Meligeni in the playoff. The match against Andre Agassi in the semi-final — which Paes lost 7-6, 6-3 — was, by Agassi's own account in his autobiography Open, 'the closest I have come to losing an Olympic match before the rounding error of fatigue.' Paes returned to India a national hero, was awarded the Khel Ratna (the first individual sportsperson to receive it after the medal), and was at the time the most-photographed athlete in India.

He then made the second of the major decisions that shaped his career: he chose doubles. Tennis singles in the 1990s, against Sampras and Agassi and the Big Four era to come, required serve-and-power his body could not produce against Western players. Doubles, on the other hand, rewarded speed, anticipation, and a specific net-game artistry he had been raised on. He partnered with the fellow Indian Mahesh Bhupathi from 1996 to 2002 — a partnership the tennis press called the 'Indian Express' — and the duo won the doubles Grand Slams at the 1999 French Open and Wimbledon, reaching the world No. 1 doubles team ranking in 1999. The partnership famously broke up in 2002 and was reconstituted, with various interpersonal vicissitudes, at every Davis Cup until 2013.

What distinguished Paes from every doubles player of his era was his career length. He won his first Grand Slam in 1999 at twenty-six. He won his eighteenth Grand Slam at the 2016 French Open in mixed doubles with Martina Hingis, at the age of forty-two — making him the oldest male player ever to win a Grand Slam title across the entire history of tennis. The line is statistical: forty-two is older than the oldest player to win a Grand Slam in any discipline, by any measure. He played his seventh and final Olympics in Tokyo 2021, at the age of 48, becoming the only tennis player in Olympic history to compete in seven Games. He retired in December 2020 at age 47, with eight men's doubles Grand Slam titles and ten mixed doubles Grand Slam titles — a total of eighteen, second-most among male doubles players in tennis history behind only Bob Bryan.

Off the court he has been the longest-tenured Davis Cup player in tennis history — 44 ties, 28 years of representation, captain at age 41. The Davis Cup record of 44 doubles wins is unbroken. He has acted in a Bollywood film (Rajdhani Express, 2013, in which he played a hostage negotiator). He has written a memoir, A Career Best, that was widely reviewed as one of the most candid sporting memoirs ever written by an Indian. He has hosted a tennis academy at the Otters' Club in Bandra. He is one of the few elite athletes who has spoken openly, on Indian television, about his difficult relationship with Bhupathi — a relationship which, despite Grand Slam titles together, fractured over disputes regarding match-fixing accusations and Davis Cup selection criteria, and which, by Paes's recent admission, he has not entirely repaired.

He is, in May 2026, 52 years old. He has a daughter, Aiyana, from a long-term relationship with Rhea Pillai. He is the only player in tennis history to have won Grand Slams in three different decades. He is, by general agreement, the most successful Indian doubles player in the history of the sport. The next Indian player to win a Grand Slam — male or female, singles or doubles — will, in all probability, do so because they grew up watching Leander Paes win Atlanta bronze on a black-and-white Doordarshan broadcast that became, in some structural way, the moment Indian tennis began.