It is obvious.
We should never lose faith in Carlos Alcaraz (19).
This tennis player, Alcaraz, is not going to be a transitory number 1: he is here to stay. It is illustrated by his regularity on any surface, and also his performance under pressure.
Instead of collapsing under pressure from Novak Djokovic, the Serb who aspires to be the best player in history, Alcaraz responds by growing even more.
This is how he has behaved in the last ten days, in the Masters 1,000 in Indian Wells, ask Daniil Medvedev, his latest victim.
A double 6-3 had conceded the Russian. A double 6-3 in a flash and as the culmination of a Masters 1,000. This is how Alcaraz handles himself under pressure.
Medvedev (27) is not an upstart either. Before compromising against Alcaraz, he had chained 19 consecutive victories.
It wasn’t bad, was it? I was proud of my streak –the Russian confessed, resigned, on Sunday night in California.
Medvedev and Sasha Zverev have been the great faces of the Next Gen. That should have been a decisive generation. There are Tiafoe, Kyrgios, Shapovalov or Rublev. These men should be in charge now.
And?
Well, the Next Gen has ended up engulfed by the tribes that surround it: we are talking about the Big Three, the holy trinity that Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic embodied, and also the young puppies that come from behind. Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Sebastian Korda or Holger Rune are beginning to be too much for that one, the Next Gen, the generation of Medvedev, Zverev and the rest.
The numbers say it.
Even as a teenager, Alcaraz can add 22 weeks as leader of the ATP circuit. He alone would accumulate more weeks as world leader than the entire Next Gen itself (actually, in the case of the Next Gen, the lead is reduced to Medvedev’s 19 weeks).
And one piece of information illuminates his resume even more: according to ATP Tour figures, Alcaraz’s 22 weeks would exceed the 21 weeks as leaders who, together, had joined Yevgeni Kafelnikov, Thomas Muster, Marcelo Ríos, Carlos Moyá and Patrick Rafter.
When asked about this dance of figures and data, Alcaraz shrugged his shoulders and said:
I can’t stop talking about it. But what I can do is not think about it. Once all this data comes in through the view, I have to forget it the second. I don’t think about breaking precocity records or anything like that. I just try to fulfill every dream I have.
Well, that’s tennis.
A dream that lasts for an instant.
A minute, maybe less.
An ace or a point resolved with a dropshot is followed by another point. And you have to win it too, a double fault returns us to the hole, each point has the same value.
On Wednesday the Miami Masters 1,000 starts, in Key Biscayne, and Alcaraz is playing for the leadership he has just recovered: the Murcian defends his 2022 victory, so he needs to get to Sunday, April 2 and win the decisive match to stay in the top.
(For now, he will debut in the second round, against the winner of the duel between Facundo Bagnis and a tennis player from the small team).
The challenge is notable, since you don’t win a Masters 1,000 just like that. Until 2022, no male Spanish tennis player had prevailed in California.
Not even Rafael Nadal.
Nadal will not be in Indian Wells this time (he is still out of the game, he has fallen to 13th place on the circuit, he had been in the Top 10 for 18 years), and neither will Djokovic, banned by the US authorities for refusing to be vaccinated against the covid. However, the other tennis talents will, including Medvedev, Casper Ruud, Andrey Rublev, Stéfanos Tsitsipás and Felix Auger-Aliassime.
