German Alexander Zverev is becoming one of the players who could dominate the circuit. At just 21, he was number three in the world, in 2018 he managed to rise after winning the ATP Finals trophy. In addition, he has won four Masters 1000 and made it to the final of the US Open in 2020.
In 2021 he was consecrated as the Olympic champion at the 2020 Tokyo Games after beating Russian Karen Khachanov in the final and won the ATP Finals in Turin beating Novak Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev along the way, and his tennis is constantly evolving.
But he also continues to grow from the physical and mental perspective. In one of the media conferences he had at the 2021 Roland Garros, he talked about his training period, together with his father who is still his coach and the importance he gave to the process in order to become the player he is today: “For me, a good coach is one who between the ages of 12 and 14 can see how his player will play in the future and go and assemble all the pieces of the puzzle to make him a player when he is 21 or 22.
Structure your game to make it a player at that age. “I’ve never been the best in either under 12 or under 14. My father always told me I had to play one way, not to be the player of the moment, but one to be, for years later.
And with my brother he did the same job before and for this I give him great credit, because we are two players with totally different styles”. What’s the point of winning in this way? Is the child being shown a wrong reality? I remember an anecdote in which Rafa Nadal says he is very happy to have won the Under-12 Spanish championships, and then his uncle Toni asked for the list of the last 25 champions of the competition: Only five had come to have a respectable career and there he said to his nephew: “You shouldn’t celebrate this title so much, but focus on improving to go far in a few years”. Mariano Baez
