What’s the name of the trophy awarded to the Australian Open men’s singles champion?
We profile the Australian Open men’s singles trophy, which was presented to 2026 winner Carlos Alcaraz on Sunday.
In addition to earning the Spaniard a seven-figure prize check, Carlos Alcaraz’s Australian Open win this weekend saw him get his hands on the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup. Installed as the tournament’s men’s singles trophy just over nine decades ago, it is named after one of Australia’s all-time tennis greats.
What to know about the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup
At Melbourne Park on Sunday, Alcaraz lifted the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup for the first time in his career, after beating Novak Djokovic in four sets in the 2026 final on Rod Laver Arena. With his victory over the 10-time Australian Open champion, the 22-year-old became the youngest man in tennis history to have won all four major singles titles.
A silver trophy crafted in the U.K. in the opening decade of the 20th century, the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup was first awarded to Fred Perry in 1934, when the Briton beat Jack Crawford to secure the men’s singles title Down Under.
As is explained in this ABC profile of the trophy, its design is based on that of the Warwick Vase, an ancient-Roman marble urn from the second century. While the Warwick Vase is nearly 10 feet tall and just over six feet wide, the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup is a somewhat scaled-down version, measuring about 16 inches in width.
Who was Norman Brookes?
Nicknamed ‘The Wizard’, Sir Norman Brookes won the men’s singles in Melbourne in 1911, when the Australian Open was known as the Australasian Championships. Four years earlier, he had made history as the first non-British man to claim the singles title at Wimbledon. The Victoria native was crowned Wimbledon champion for a second time in 1914, as well as enjoying two doubles triumphs in SW19.
Knighted in 1939, Brookes, who went on to spend three decades as president of the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia, died at the age of 90 in 1968. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1977.
Do players get to keep the Australian Open trophy?
The winner of the Australian Open men’s singles title does not get to keep the original Norman Brookes Challenge Cup, but he is given a full-size replica. The same goes for the women’s singles champion, who lifts the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup.
In the opening decades of the 121-year-old Australian tournament, however, players could earn the right to hold on to the original winner’s trophy. Indeed, the introduction of the Norman Brookes and Akhurst Cups - which both debuted in the same year - coincided with a major policy change in this regard.
Before 1934, “if you won the title three times in a row or five times in all, you got to keep the trophy,” explains Geoff Pollard, the former president of Tennis Australia, in an interview with the Australian Open website.
Crawford had won three straight men’s titles between 1931 and 1933. In the women’s competition, Akhurst had done likewise in 1928, 1929 and 1930 - a three-repeat that also took her total of Australasian Championship titles to five. Per Pollard, Akhurst’s 1930 triumph was followed by a brief period in which there was no women’s trophy.
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