The day Steffi Graf won the October 1, 1988, was…
On this day in 1988, October 1, the Olympic singles final in Seoul saw Steffi Graf defeat Gabriela Sabatini (6-3, 6-3). Not too long after finishing the calendar Grand Slam, the German athlete topped her season with a gold medal. This accomplishment would go down in history as a “Golden Slam,” a term coined expressly to characterize this exceptional accomplishment, and it would elevate Graf’s 1988 tennis season to the pinnacle of all time.
Steffi Graf was born in 1969. In 1982, at the age of 13, she became the youngest girl to ever get a WTA ranking. After winning the demonstration event held at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, she constantly improved her game and her results. At the age of 16, she reached the semi-final at the 1985 US Open, defeated by world No 1 Martina Navratilova (6-2, 6-3).
She reached the US Open semifinals twice before winning her first WTA championship at Hilton Head in 1986. Under the close supervision of her father, Peter Graf, she achieved her breakthrough year in 1987 when she won her first Grand Slam championship, defeating Navratilova in the Roland-Garros final and placing second at Wimbledon and the US Open.
On August 17, she even took the top WTA ranking from the American, who held it with little interruption since 1982. Steffi Graf started 1988 by beating Chris Evert (6-1, 7-6) to win the Australian Open, and in June, she triumphed at Roland-Garros as well, punishing Natasha Zvereva (6-0, 6-0) in the shortest Grand Slam final in tennis history.
After the Wimbledon final, where she beat six-time defending champion Navratilova (5-7, 6-2, 6-1), Graf had established a heavy domination on the tour, and at the US Open, she wrote a new page of tennis history, beating Gabriela Sabatini in the final (6-3, 3-6, 6-1) to achieve the first calendar Grand Slam since 1970.
Gabriela Sabatini, from Argentina, was born in 1970. Successful at a very young age, in 1985, she became the youngest player to reach the semi-final at Roland-Garros, where she was defeated by Chris Evert (6-4, 6-1). In the following years, Sabatini, displaying a beautiful one-handed backhand, firmly established herself in the top 10, reaching the semi-final at Wimbledon in 1986 (lost 6-2, 6-2 to Martina Navratilova), and two more times at the French Open in 1987 and 1988, each time defeated by Steffi Graf.
