Christopher Clarey

Christopher Clarey has covered global sports for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune for more than 30 years from bases in France, Spain and the United States. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on tennis and the Olympics, reporting from more than 100 Grand Slam tournaments and from seven Summer Olympics, seven Winter Olympics and nine world track and field championships. In 2021, Clarey’s in-depth biography of Roger Federer was published and became a New York Times bestseller and international success.

The Master: The Long Run and Beautiful Game of Roger Federer was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, the Times of London and the Sydney Morning Herald. It received favorable reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Australian, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, The Straits Times, The Hindu, Kirkus, Library Journal and others. Booklist gave it a starred review and named it one of the best 10 sports and recreation books of the year. The Times of London called it “certainly the best Federer biography yet published”. Corriere dello Sport in Italy called it a “monumental opera”.

The Master, also a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon in several categories and in several countries, is based on 20 years of interviews and travels following the Swiss champion and this golden age in men’s tennis. The publisher is Hachette Group’s “Twelve” in North America and John Murray in the U.K., India, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Sevnteen deals for foreign-language rights were secured, including Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Russia, Spain and Taiwan.

Fluent in French and Spanish, Clarey has traveled in and reported from more than 70 countries on six continents. He has written for the Times since 1991. In 1998, he was named chief sports correspondent at the International Herald Tribune, which later became the International New York Times. He wrote a general sports column, “In the Arena”, for 16 years.

In 2018, Clarey received the Eugene L. Scott Award from the International Tennis Hall of Fame, a career prize awarded for “communicating honestly and critically about the game” and for “making a significant impact on the tennis world”. Previous winners include Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Clarey is also a past winner of the Associated Press Sports Editors contest in the breaking news category for coverage of South African runner Caster Semenya.

A former television commentator for Eurosport, Mr. Clarey has made regular appearances for more than 20 years on major international television and radio outlets. His Twitter account has been named one of 50 must-follows for tennis and the Olympics by Sports Illustrated and Eurosport. Clarey’s other areas of expertise include soccer and sailing: he has covered six World Cups and five America’s Cups. But he also has reported on nearly every major international sport, covering 21 British Opens, 10 Ryder Cups, eight world figure skating championships, the Super Bowl and the Rugby Union World Cup. He has written about everything from bullfighting to sepak takraw to the Inuit sport known as the knuckle hop.

Born in Newport, Rhode Island, Clarey grew up primarily in Washington D.C; Hawaii and Coronado, Calif.. He is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where he majored in English and History. While at Williams, he was a soccer goalkeeper, captain of the volleyball team and the No. 1 tennis player. He and his wife Virginie, proud parents of three multilingual daughters, are based in the Boston area and in Paris.