The afternoon progresses at the RCTB and the fan does not know where to look, because a handful of interesting things happen at the same time.
Part of the parish looks out at track 2, and thus checks what the good Jannik Sinner (20) is doing, an iceberg who plays doubles with Alex de Minaur and whose future, experts say, will hold outstanding duels against Carlos Alcaraz.
Others go to the Andrés Gimeno court, full to the brim, to see Francis Tiafoe (25): the colossal American, son of a worker from Sierra Leone who had given his life to open the doors of tennis for his son, is now feeling the weight of tradition.
Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz are the representatives of the new American generation: they are the heirs of Connors, McEnroe, Aggasi, Courier, Sampras or Roddick.
And that weighs.
Another 7,800 spectators stop at the Rafael Nadal court. The crowd is absolute, an exceptional fact in the tournament, since it is Tuesday, not Wednesday.
What happens is that Carlos Alcaraz (19) plays.
And the Murcian is a magnet.
The Murcian is a magnet, and the chronicler takes note from the beginning. Alcaraz is fire, and his crucible of possibilities stuns Nuno Borges (26), a timid adversary who oscillates between the ATP circuit and Challenger tournaments and who swims against the current.
“If I’ve developed something in the last year, it’s maturity,” Alcaraz had said in recent days.
He was referring to the pause in the committed moments.
“Now I read better,” he said.
And the chronicler notices that, he understands that Alcaraz reads better.
(Only in this way can it be understood that he has settled in the world Top 3, today as number 2, and has taken over two of the four tournaments he has played in this 2023).
Alcaraz moves like a cat, he is elastic and solid at the same time, and the Portuguese’s arreón responds with a whiplash. An ace, a drop shot, a parallel right that silences Borges and stirs up the parish.
Alcaraz tempers when he touches, and yet he keeps the tension high, and in just 34 minutes he has already dispatched the first set. That, in a jiffy, is the time it has taken Borges to understand what all this is about.
You will no longer be able to overcome this commitment.
And everything has gone so fast that the chronicler puts himself in perspective and recovers Alcaraz’s adventures last year. His first title in Barcelona, ​​that of 2022, had had its servitudes. Kwon, Tsitsipás and De Minaur had made life difficult for him, or perhaps he had made it difficult for himself, determined as he was to win a Pulitzer for every blow, still too bold, still too teenage.
Now, Alcaraz reads things.
And he doesn’t hesitate.
