After Robert Farah captured the men’s doubles title with partner Juan Sebastian Cabal (above, left, with his son, Jacobo, and Farah) at Wimbledon this past July—defeating Nicolas Mahut and Edouard Roger-Vasselin in a physical, crackling nailbiter of a contest, 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, 6-7, 6-3—he flew to Bogota in his native Colombia and was immediately swarmed as he walked off the plane.
"I kept saying to the Colombian media, 'I felt like Shakira for two hours,'" he recalled. "You come out and there are all these journalists, and everyone’s coming [up to you] and they’re chanting 'Colombia, Colombia!' And there's a bunch of flags in the airport. Sebas [Cabal] arrived to Cali, Colombia, and there were basically 20,000 people there. They received him with a fire truck. They put him on top of the fire truck with the flags and there was a caravan that went into the city."
Cali will need to send another fire truck. Just two months later, Cabal and Farah have triumphed again in another Grand Slam, overcoming Marcel Granollers and Horacio Zeballos to lift the 2019 US Open trophy, 6-4, 7-5. They are just the third twosome this century to win both majors in the same year—behind Mike Bryan and Jack Sock, who achieved the same feat twelve months ago, and Jonas Bjorkman and Todd Woodbridge, who did it in 2003—and are the first-ever South American team to prevail in men’s doubles at the US Open in the Open era.
But the pair's good fortune didn’t occur overnight. Cabal and Farah, who have been friends since they were kids, first teamed up at Wimbledon in 2011. Unlike other doubles pairings, which can often dissipate after a string of bad results (Cabal and Farah lost six of their first seven finals), the duo opted to stick it out and nurture their partnership. To be sure, they've had plenty of success in that time, but everything has really clicked on a larger level over the past two years. In 2018, they qualified for the ATP Year-End Doubles Finals, where they made it out of the group stage and into the semifinals. This season, they've won five titles: On the clay in Barcelona and Rome, on the grass in Eastbourne and at Wimbledon, and now on the hard courts at Flushing Meadows. They are the only team on tour who has already qualified for the ATP Doubles Finals this year.
"[We] just believe in the work," Cabal said about what's made the difference recently. "We’ve put ourselves in these kinds of moments, this kind of pressure a lot of times before, so we are handling the big times really well. You know what's gonna happen, you know how you are gonna react. If it’s normal to be in this situation, you handle it better every time, you play better in these types of matches."
Their US Open matches definitely carried some extra weight, however. Just days before the tournament began, the pair learned that Roberto Cocheteux, a businessman who championed and sponsored the growth of tennis in Colombia, had passed away. Cocheteux played a major role in the development of Cabal and Farah's careers.
"We couldn't go to his burial because we had to stay here," Farah said after the final during the trophy presentation, while Cabal choked back tears. "It was very tough for us, and so we said we would dedicate this tournament to him, and there's no better way to dedicate [a tournament] than to win it."
Added Cabal, "We're living a dream. It was really difficult times two weeks ago. We made a decision to fight for it, to play for him and we honor him right now. We're happy we can do this for him, and hopefully he is in the sky watching us."
Indeed, their triumph is ultimately the perfect gift to a man so influential in laying the groundwork for the expansion of tennis in their home country. Because if their Shakira-like reception after Wimbledon is any indication, tennis in Colombia is primed to explode just as Cocheteux would have wanted, thanks to everybody watching them.
