The Big 3 have been at the heart of every tennis conversation.
Carlos Alcaraz has not only become the youngest number one in the history of tennis. At 19 years and four months he has also managed to enter the Top 10 of the earliest players to succeed in a Grand Slam, joining an extraordinary group, but throughout 2022 he has also become: the youngest in winning the ATP 1000 in Madrid and Miami, the youngest in history to beat both Nadal and Djokovic, the youngest champion of an ATP 500 event but also the youngest to win at Flushing Meadows by Pete Sampras in 1990.
As for the Grand Slam tournaments, the young Spanish champion managed to add the first pearl to the collection in the ninth participation of his career. The first glimpse of last season and the extraordinary victory with Stefanos Tsitsipas in the round of 16 before retiring against Félix Auger Aliassime.
First round loss in the 2020 junior draw, relative to the 2021 Australian Open on debut. In that case, Alcaraz had made the cut in qualifications, he played in a totally new way in Abu Dhabi, before losing to Mikael Ymer in the second round.
He was dynamic in Paris, although after qualifying it was Jan-Lennard Struff who ended the Spaniard’s adventure in the third round. After the third round at Melbourne Park in 2022, the quarterfinals in Paris and the round of 16 at Wimbledon, the Spaniard has completed a two-week season of three consecutive matches in the fifth set, with Cilic, Sinner and Tiafoe, with victory.
Nadal had managed to win on the red brick of the Bois de Boulogne in the sixth participation of his career in the main draw of a Grand Slam in 2005, Djokovic had put the first of the twenty-one pieces on the mosaic in his thirteenth appearance, in Australia in 2008, following the final at the US Open the previous season.
Roger Federer, on the other hand, needed seventeen strokes to dispel the taboo and triumph on the Championship turf in 2003.
Federer will represent Team Europe
Dan Evans heaped praise on Roger Federer and his personality, calling him a normal and down-to-earth person.
“Yeah, I think the biggest compliment I can give him is he was very, very normal, down-to-earth person who was obviously good in king-like status in the sport. He treated me, and he treats everybody exactly like the normal bloke on the street to their mate.
That was the biggest compliment I can give him. Obviously a very good practice partner to be able to practice with. Yeah, he was like his phone, would never go off out loud in a press conference,” he said. “He would say hello to everybody on tour.
Obviously to be as good as he was, he obviously wasn’t nice to everybody, I’m sure, but an amazing competitor. He’ll be sorely missed, I think. It will be different for the older guys to not have him around. It’s unfortunate for the younger generation to not see how he operated, yeah,” he added.
