By Simon Cambers and Simon Graf
Wrestler Urs Bürgler tells with a smirk how he met Roger Federer for the first time at the beginning of the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000.
“We opened the door to our house in the athletes’ village and Rogi sat at the table and had a puzzle with 3000 pieces in front of him. Mountains, lakes and a bird in the middle. He sat there in peace, all alone and absorbed in his task. You have to have patience and nerve to solve such a huge puzzle. Especially a nature puzzle where almost every piece looks the same.”
Roger Federer is embraced by wife Mirka after his final match at the Laver Cup last September.Credit:AP
The wrestlers and the tennis players shared a semi-detached house during those Olympics. Greco-Roman wrestler Bürgler, 1.90 metres tall and weighing 100 kilos, a mountain of a man, but amiable and with a good sense of humour, laughs: “The people in charge at Swiss Olympic perhaps thought, the tennis players need protection, we’ll assign the wrestlers to them so they can keep an eye out down below.”
So the wrestlers slept on the ground floor, where there was also a social room; Federer, his coach Peter Lundgren, Mirka Vavrinec and Emmanuelle Gagliardi were upstairs. It was a spacious house with seven or eight bedrooms, Bürgler remembers. Later, beach volleyball players Paul and Martin Laciga also moved in for a few nights.
“Rogi was only 19, a youngster, and I was almost 10 years older. But we connected right away. I was still a child at heart back then, and I still am today,” said Bürgler. “Rogi was also up for any mischief. He was completely relaxed; you could have stolen horses with him. That’s how we became friends.
Getting carried away: Roger Federer with Swiss wrestler Urs Bürgler.Credit:Urs Bürgler
″We were always on the road together for those two weeks, and I watched all his matches. My competition was only towards the end of the Games, so I had time for that.”
Federer was not yet a star, “But people already thought that he could become one some day,” Bürgler said. “He was already No. 36 in the world at the time.”
In Sydney, he played his way to the semi-finals before losing to Tommy Haas and the bronze-medal match against the Frenchman Arnaud Di Pasquale. “He should have beaten him,” said Bürgler, who finished seventh in his competition. But the grand finale, which would shape Federer’s life much more than his sporting performance, was still to come.
Bürgler soon realised in Sydney that the latter had his eye on Vavrinec. “Mirka was very open-minded; you could talk to her about anything,” he recalled. “At one point, Rogi asked me: ‘What do you think of Mirka? I think she’s great!’ I said, ‘She’s a good one. If you have a chance with her, you have to strike!’ They had fun together, but he was hesitant to make the first move. He was so shy, so decent. You could tell he came from a good home. And he didn’t have that much experience in these things either; he’d only had one girlfriend before. Mirka was more mature. She had experienced more in terms of relationships.”
When Federer missed his second chance to win a medal against Di Pasquale and was bitterly disappointed, the Swiss Olympic flatmates went out in the evening. “Mirka, Rogi, Peter and I went to the Holland Heineken House, which was always the most happening place. But that evening, it was still a bit early. We stood at the bar and had a drink; next to us was the emergency exit. It was warm inside, and the door was open. At some point, Mirka said she was going outside for fresh air. I grabbed Rogi and said to him: ‘Now, Roger, this is your chance!’
“And he: ‘Do you think so?’ Me: ‘Yeah, sure, now you have to go for it!’ Him: ‘What should I say?’
‘Tell her you were warm too. I’ll shut the door, and you’ll be out there to yourselves’.”
Early days: Roger and Mirka in 2006.Credit:AP
No sooner said than done. Federer also went outside; Bürgler closed the door after 30 seconds. “Then they gave each other their first kiss. They were outside for half an hour. When they returned, they were both beaming. The next morning he told me every detail. But I keep that to myself; it’s too intimate. Before Rogi left, he wrote me a little letter. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep it. He wrote: ‘Dear Urs, thank you very much for these two weeks. They were the best two weeks of my life.’ I still get goosebumps when I think about it.”
While Federer continued with the indoor tournaments in Europe, in Vienna, Basel, Stuttgart, Lyon, Paris and Stockholm, Bürgler travelled alone for three and a half weeks as a backpacker through Australia after the Olympics.
Federer and Bürgler continued to maintain contact after the Olympic Games. “I had only followed tennis on the side before,” said the wrestler. “But Rogi brought me to tennis.” After Wimbledon 2001, where he beat his idol, Pete Sampras, Federer invited Bürgler to the tournament in Gstaad at the beginning of July. Bürgler quickly realised that Federer was now moving in a different sphere: “I asked him, ‘Do you have a room for us?’ He said, ‘Just come, and I’ll take care of you. Pull up at the bottom of the Hotel Palace, and you can come up to the third floor’.”
When Bürgler and his girlfriend at the time knocked on the room door Federer had given him, Mirka and Federer opened it.
“They greeted us and showed us around everywhere. The living room alone was 100 square metres, it had TVs everywhere, even in the bathroom, and the whole thing existed twice. Two flats were connected, one of which we were free to use. We spent three nights in Gstaad, watched tennis, and played cards with Rogi. And when the weather was bad, I went to a spa with him and Marat Safin. He was also totally relaxed.”
Federer lost in the opening round to his future coach Ivan Ljubicic in the singles, but in the doubles, he advanced to the final with Safin.
Federer’s wife Mirka with their twin girls, Charlene and Myla, and twin boys, Lenny and Leo, at the Wimbledon final in 2019.Credit:Getty Images
With Ludwig Küng, the national coach of the freestyle wrestlers, who had also been in Sydney, Bürgler visited Federer at the Swiss Indoors in Basel in 2001. At his home tournament, Federer always used to sleep in a hotel to keep up the routine. He put up his Olympic colleagues at his home in the terraced house in Münchenstein, with his mother Lynette, father Robert and sister Diana. “Ludi slept in a guest bed and I slept in Rogi’s children’s room. Next to the bed, there was a huge pile of tennis magazines.”
In return, that November, when the tennis season was over, Federer and Mirka visited the wrestlers at a team competition in the multipurpose hall in Eichberg in the Rhine Valley of St Gallen. In Sydney, Federer had watched some wrestling matches on TV, so he already had some prior knowledge. “I had the feeling he liked it,” said Bürgler. “Man against man, like tennis.”
One day he also visited Bürgler in the latter’s wrestling flatshare in Oberriet in St Gallen and spent the night there.
The Roger Federer Effect, Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives.
“After the disco, we ended up in a bar at two in the morning. We were drinking a beer when a colleague of mine, already quite drunk, came up to us, examined him closely and said: ‘Hey, you look like Federer!’ Rogi replied with a mischievous smile: ‘Yes, many people have mentioned that to me.’” When he later told his colleague that he had not been mistaken, that it had indeed been Federer, the latter could hardly believe it. The young tennis pro was well on his way to becoming a celebrity in Switzerland.
The contact remained, and at Federer’s chalet in Valbella in the Grisons mountains, Bürgler, a trained road builder, asphalted the driveway. And he followed Federer’s career intensively, often got tickets from him and travelled to the grand slams.
Bürgler regrets that they don’t see as much of each other as they used to.
Would he have thought back then in Sydney that Federer and Vavrinec would be such a good match? He shrugs it off. “In this age, relationships come and go, and you’re not yet thinking about getting married and having children. What has become of it is amazing. They have never had a scandal or anything! And she manages his whole life.”
He is proud that he became the midwife of this relationship. He said: “Maybe it needed me. Maybe they would have gotten together without me. But who knows, after the Olympic Games, they would have gone their separate ways again if Rogi hadn’t gone on the attack that night.” He paused and said: “Maybe I was the last piece missing from his 3000-piece puzzle.”
The Roger Federer Effect, Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives, by Simon Cambers and Simon Graf, is available in bookstores and online at www.dymocks.com.au or other online bookstores.
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