It was March in the California desert. Roger Federer was back at No. 1, and Feliciano Lopez, a fellow 36-year-old, was asked if any man would ever get to the top spot at that advanced age again.
“No,” Lopez said to me immediately. “There are many things that Roger achieved that won’t happen again.”
That is difficult to contest in light of Federer’s winning combination of excellence and longevity, but Lopez is about to match one Federer record at this year’s French Open, which began in Paris on Sunday.
This will be Lopez’s 65th consecutive appearance in a Grand Slam singles tournament, the same number that Federer managed before skipping the 2016 French Open to preserve his then-ailing body.