Younes El Aynaoui

Younes El Aynaoui is a Moroccan former professional tennis player and coach, born in Rabat on 12 September 1971, who turned professional in 1990. He won five ATP Tour singles titles and reached his career-high singles ranking of world No. 14 in March 2003, at the age of 31. ^{1 2}

He is best remembered for his 2003 Australian Open quarter-final against Andy Roddick, a five-set, five-hour match whose fifth set ran to 21–19 and was then the longest fifth set in Grand Slam history. ^{1 3}

King Mohammed VI awarded him the gold medal, Morocco's highest sporting honour, and in a 2003 poll by the newspaper L'Economiste its readers named him their favourite role model for society, ahead of the athletics star Hicham El Guerrouj. ^{1 3}

El Aynaoui grew up in Rabat's Agdal district, the second son of a Moroccan father from Berkane who worked at the Ministry of Finance and a French mother who worked at the French embassy. A football fan as a child, he switched to tennis, taking the French player Yannick Noah as his idol. ³

In 1990, aged 18, he travelled to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, for one week and decided to turn professional; to afford the fees over the next two years he drove the academy bus, cleaned the gym, strung rackets and babysat younger players. ^{1 3}

He reached his first top-level final in Casablanca in 1993, losing to Guillermo Pérez Roldán. After three runner-up finishes in 1996 he broke his right ankle, had surgery that November and again in February 1998, and returned ranked world No. 444; he won five Challenger titles, finished 1998 ranked No. 49, and was named the ATP Comeback Player of the Year. ¹

He won his first top-level title in Amsterdam in 1999 and a second at Bucharest in 2001, then three titles in 2002 (Casablanca, Doha and Munich) with a US Open quarter-final, and in 2003 reached the quarter-finals of the Australian and US Opens and ended the season at his career-high ranking of No. 14. ^{1 3}

At the 2003 Australian Open he beat world No. 1 Lleyton Hewitt in the round of 16 before the quarter-final against Roddick, in which both men saved match points and Roddick finally won 4–6, 7–6, 4–6, 6–4, 21–19. ¹

Injuries kept him out between September 2008 and January 2010. Earlier comeback milestones mark his longevity: a semi-final at Munich in 2008 made him the oldest player to reach an ATP semi-final since Jimmy Connors in 1993, a main-draw win at Doha in 2010 made him, at 38, the oldest to win a main-tour match since Connors in 1995, and a tournament in Manama in March 2017 made him, at 45, the oldest player ever to hold an ATP ranking. ¹

He now coaches the French player Hugo Gaston. His son Neil El Aynaoui is a professional footballer with AS Roma and the Morocco national team. ¹

His five ATP singles titles are Amsterdam 1999, Bucharest 2001, and Casablanca, Doha and Munich in 2002, with eleven further runner-up finishes. ^{1 3}

He speaks six languages — Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese — and has worked to spread the game and in social activities. ³

This section presents positions reported by the sources; it is not the museum's verdict on any of them.

Moroccan readers treated him as a social role model as much as a sportsman: in L'Economiste's 2003 poll he was voted the public's favourite role model ahead of the prime minister and of Hicham El Guerrouj, and the Royal Tennis Club named its main court after him. ^{3 1}

His 2003 match with Roddick drew wide praise; the Arabic article reports John McEnroe calling it the finest match he had ever watched or commentated on. ³

Against that, the sources describe a career repeatedly interrupted by injury — the broken ankle of 1996, two operations and long absences in 1997, 2008 and 2009 — so that his peak ranking came only at 31. ¹

On retiring at Doha in 2010 he said, as the Arabic article reports, that he was ready to put his experience at the service of later generations of Arab athletes in Qatar or elsewhere. ³

The sources used here state no religion for El Aynaoui: neither article gives one, and his Wikidata item carries no religion statement, so the museum records no faith or school for him. ^{1 3 2}

A note on his birth year: the Arabic article's lead gives 12 September 1972, while the English article and Wikidata give 12 September 1971; this article follows 1971, on which two sources agree. ^{3 1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.