On-site at Babolat - Nadal and Thiem are omnipresent
Near Lyons is the headquarters of Babolat. The effort involved in research, production and sales is enormous.
by Jens Huiber
last edit: Dec 03, 2019, 09:42 pm
By Jens Huiber from Corbas
The fact that the guests in the head office of Babolat are received in the conference room "Carlos Moya" has a very natural reason: With the triumph of the Spaniard in Roland Garros in 1998, the French manufacturer immortalized itself as a successful producer of tennis rackets on the map for the first time Babolat only as a string manufacturer a veritable part of the professional circus. Moya, though, that was the one with the blue thug who no one really knew what the thing was capable of. All the more fitting that Carlos Moya, who has been a coach for some time now, has been successful as coach of the man whom Babolat has had since his earliest youth: Rafael Nadal.
And the Spaniard is also in Corbas, a few miles outside of Lyon, omnipresent. Already at the entrance Nadal greets from a poster, in a still very young edition, next to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga by the way. And so posters of the twelve-time French Open champion run like a red thread through the company building, which houses not only the global logistics center but also a part of the string factory. Those for synthetic fabrics - the production of natural gut strings, now almost exclusively Babolat worldwide, is housed in Brittany.
Up to eight individual, thin strings are first washed in high-percentage alcohol, then glued to a single string, dried, and finally twirled. And already under stress in the working street. The strings are packed in different tranches, on one of the large coils find 10 km of space.
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Thiem visits the Babolat factory
Production takes place in shifts from Monday morning to Saturday, also five o'clock in the morning. CEO Eric Babolat employs twelve people in this department alone, which also houses a core element of the company: the so-called "customizing". Here are the racquets for the top stars on weight, balance and grip size adapted to the needs, up to 40 pieces consumed by a man like Dominic Thiem per season about. All that reaches the Austrian World Ranking Fourth, however, must first by a test road, where the bending capacity of the frame is checked as well as the resilience of the fabric.
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First and foremost, weight and grip strength are changed, for each player Babolat has created his own file with the exact specifications.
Thiem paid a visit to the factory last year, spending a bit longer in Lyon, winning the ATP Tour 250 tournament the week before the French Open. Thiem switched strings in the summer of 2019, using the time between leaving Wimbledon and returning to Sand in Hamburg for optimization. Dominic Thiem has found a place visually in the research department, some personalized racquets are ready to ship in Corbas.
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Nadal wakes up as a cardboard mate
But what is right for the Austrian number one only has to be cheap for all other customers of Babolat: global logistics starts here, even if certain products are not manufactured in France. Automation is well advanced, yet more than 20 skilled workers handle packaging and shipping. But the big Spanish champion can not get along: even on the assembly line, which sends the finished products on the journey, Rafael Nadal watches as Pappkamerad on the orderly course.
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