Clay, grass, clay: the surface transition never really seen in tennis, until a succession of two Grand Slam tournaments and one Olympic Games in 2024.
With two events complete and one almost done, Carlos Alcaraz is handling business, and the rest of the field don’t have an answer.
After beating Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime soundly at the French Open a couple of months ago, the 21-year-old Spaniard and French Open and Wimbledon champion dismantled his opponent in the 2024 Paris Olympic semifinals, winning 6-1, 6-1. As that medal of mythic import gets closer, in a sport in which it is not the pinnacle, Alcaraz has already held three of the four Grand Slam trophies aloft.
With No 1 seed Novak Djokovic ailing, and fearing a recurrence of his knee injury, and rising Italian 22-year-old Lorenzo Musetti his other possible opponent, he is one match from gold. He is guaranteed silver.
In bright sunshine at Roland Garros on Friday, both sets followed a pattern to a tee, as if Alcaraz had scripted them. Lose a game while returning; win a game on serve. In the second set, the other way round.
Then, spend five games pulling Auger-Aliassime all about the court, discombobulating his game plan until he’s throwing in new ideas like he has to do, but not having any of them work, getting more and more confused until he looks across the net and it’s 1-5 and it’s over.
At the baseline, he traded high, heavy groundstrokes before seizing on a ball that wasn’t quite deep enough and arrowing it into the corner. At the net, he controlled the Canadian’s court position like he was programming a dance mat.
Alcaraz was irresistible at times (Daniel Kopatsch/Getty Images)
Alcaraz broke the Auger-Aliassime serve from 40-15 behind on multiple occasions, with a sprinkling of winners (just eight in the first set) ballasted by the mental pressure Auger-Aliassime felt, feeding on scraps of opportunity and over-pressing on easy shots.
Alcaraz, meanwhile, appears to be adding layers to his already stacked game in real time. After losing out to America’s Rajeev Ram and Austin Krajicek in his ‘Nadalcaraz’ doubles jaunt with Rafael Nadal, he has locked back in.
GO DEEPER
Irresistible force of Nadalcaraz falls at the Olympics to an immovable object
By his standards, he won the French Open and Wimbledon in fairly muddling fashion, only truly accelerating into life when he needed it — whether losing, or in the two finals.
Something similar is happening here, as with the gold medal match in sight, he’s playing somewhere near the top of his game. Call it clutch, call it timely, call it what you want — if he’s unlocking that particular skill at 21, everybody else is going to have to catch up.
Required reading
(Top photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
