Carlos Alcaraz y Holger Rune They will fight this Friday (around 4:00 p.m., Sports by M +) for a place in the semifinals of the Masters 1,000 in Paris. Generation mates (both 19 years old)they know each other well because they coincided in their formative stage and have already faced each other once as professionals. It was last year at the NextGen ATP Finals in Milan. Alcaraz won there (4-3, 4-2 and 4-0), ultimately champion.
But they haven’t always been on opposite sides of the track. When they were 14, in 2017, they formed a doubles pair at Les Petits AS, a prestigious international children’s tournament that takes place in the French town of Tarbes and to which 7,000 young tennis players aspire to reach a final table of 64. In this event, Alcaraz and Rune they won 6-3 and 6-2 Croatian Lovre Erceg and Montenegrin Danilo Raicevic, who have not yet debuted in the ATP.
That year, neither Carlos nor Holger won the tournament, Luca Nardi did, who is currently 129th in the world. The Italian beat Rune in the quarterfinals, while Alcaraz fell in the second round to Toby Kodat, who was one of the Americans, along with Martin Damm, who defeated the Spanish-Danish couple in the quarterfinals of the doubles draw. Curiously, the duo that will be measured this Friday in Paris Bercy is the one that has come the farthest from that Les Petits As, in which they also played, among others, Daniel Rincón and Bjorn Borg’s son, Leo.
