JOHANNA WALLEN/Bildbyran/IMAGO
Big mouth, quick arm: Mikael Ymer at the Stockholm Open
At the end of the season you escape to the hall. The oldest of the current indoor tournaments of the Association of Tennis Professionals, better known by the abbreviation ATP, takes place in Stockholm. The Stockholm Open was opened for the first time in 1969. For a long time it was one of the most important European indoor tournaments. After the reform of the ATP Tour in 1990, the tournament belonged to the so-called Super 9 (the forerunners of today’s Masters 1,000). The game is played at the Royal Tennis Hall on Djurgården, one of the islands that form central Stockholm. There is a lot royal there. Next door is the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Library, with a fertility center in between.
Anyone who visits the tennis hall during the tournament week will encounter overzealous spectators at the entrance who are photographing the show car of a German automobile manufacturer. The airport principle is followed in the hall itself. To get to the tennis courts you have to go through the sales area: watches, clothes, vitamin water, more show cars. This is followed by the »Champions Lounge«, where you can enjoy a beer for 7.50 euros – the bargain on offer. The only magazine next to that The Swedish Tennis magazine is Today’s Industry.
On the way to the press area one passes pictures of previous tournament winners: Arthur Ashe, Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Boris Becker (the latter two being the record winners with four titles each). Evidence of a time when the Stockholm tournament still enjoyed a very high status. It finally lost this in 1995 when it was downgraded to the lowest level of the ATP tournaments: it has become a 250. That means: The winner receives 250 points for the world ranking. Above that are the 500s (like the tournaments in Basel and Vienna this week), the Masters 1,000 series (the last of the season next week in Paris), the ATP finals in mid-November in Turin with a maximum of 1,500 points for the winner and the four Grand Slam tournaments, in which the winner gets 2,000 points for the ranking, but which are not under the auspices of the ATP, which repeatedly (like this year in Wimbledon) leads to conflicts.
The devaluation of the Stockholm Open corresponded with Sweden’s decline as a tennis superpower. Stefan Edberg was Sweden’s last number one in 1992, and the last Davis Cup win was in 1998. Today, brothers Mikael and Elias Ymer are the top-ranked Swedish players: Mikael is ranked 79th, Elias 129th.
Things went well for both of them at this year’s Stockholm Open. Mikael defeated last year’s winner Tommy Paul (USA) in round two before losing out in the quarter-finals against number one of the tournament, world number five Stefanos Tsitsipas (Greece) 5:7, 3:6. In round one, Elias defeated the only German in the tournament, Oscar Otte from Cologne. In round two he led against the world number 17. Frances Tiafoe (USA) with 6:3 and 4:0, but ultimately lost 6:3, 6:7, 6:7. Leo Borg, son of the famous Björn, missed a sensation in round one: The 19-year-old number 577 in the world rankings, who was allowed to compete thanks to a wildcard, won the first set against the defending champion Tommy Paul, but had to lose 7: 5, 4 :6, 1:6 beaten.
Mikael Ymer made headlines before the tournament when he said an ATP tournament in Sweden without him was like “a salad at McDonald’s”. After all, the organizers were able to persuade him to compete this year. Ymer is known for skipping the Swedish ATP tournaments (besides the 250 in Stockholm there is one in Båstad). As an explanation, he once stated that Zlatan Ibrahimovic would not play in the Swedish football league either. The comparison with Ibrahimovic is no coincidence. Mikael and Elias Ymer’s parents came to Sweden from Ethiopia in the 1980s. Like Ibrahimovic, not everyone in Sweden likes the Ymers as sporting figureheads.
At his appearance in Stockholm, Mikael Ymer was close to the people. After his first-round win over Frenchman Quentin Halys, he declared to the audience: »There is nothing better than playing in front of you!« After his victory against Tommy Paul, he interspersed a Swedish sentence into the English on-court interview: »I would really like to speak Swedish, but I’ll get a fine if I do that.’ That wasn’t a lie. The organizers oblige the players to speak English, because after all, it is important to serve an international television and streaming audience.
Anyone who visits a 250 tournament on the ATP tour may not always see the best players and the biggest stadiums. But there is something else to experience. Anyone who heads to the Royal Tennis Hall in the morning of the tournament week can watch the pros training up close. There are different variants. The 19-year-old Danish high-flyer Holger Rune, quarter-finalist at this year’s French Open, performs with an entourage that recently also included French star coach Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams’ coach for ten years. Meanwhile, double routines like Philipp Oswald (Austria) and Lukasz Kubot (Poland) are hiding in the furthest corner of the hall, without anyone accompanying them. Somewhere in between, a busybody tells Franco-American Maxime Cressy how to hit a return. The number 33 in the world rankings patiently endures it.
When the game starts, things are still family-like on the side pitches. One of the first round matches in doubles takes place in front of a hand-counted nine spectators. Even the center court, with wooden stands for up to 5,000 people, is only half full on the first days of the tournament. If you position yourself well, you can overhear conversations between players and coaches and see the raised thumbs with which the chair umpire praises the line judges after correct decisions. The sponsors’ boxes remain empty despite the chilled champagne, the advertising effect seems to be the most important. The royal box isn’t well attended during the week either, although Prince Daniel attends the Ymer brothers’ games.
On Sunday, at the final, the royal family traditionally meets. The match was over jW– Editorial deadline still in progress, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Holger Rune faced each other. Tsitsipas won his first title on the tour in Stockholm in 2018, for him victory in 2022 would be a nice déjà vu. It would be a satisfaction for Rune, who is making his debut in Stockholm, after being relegated to a second place in round two. His mother and manager Aneke said: “We thought it was important to support the Scandinavian tournaments, but if we are treated like this, we will take that into account in our planning in the future”. on Zlatan makes.
