Before February of this year, Felix Auger-Aliassime was just another good tennis player. A boy with a privileged physique (1.93), powerful serve and forehand and a hopeful future, but that did not quite come together. He lacked the ‘killer’ instinct to separate himself from the straw and begin to build a place among those considered the best tennis players on the circuit. For some time now, he has taken that step. Between February and November he won the four ATP titles that appear in his record and this Sunday, with Grand Slams still to come (it would be strange if one did not fall in the future), he entered a select club, that of the Davis Cup champions.
The Auger-Aliassime figures on this course are sensational. He has won 60 games out of 87, he has been champion in Rotterdam, Florence, Antwerp and Basel (the first and last in the 500 category), it is five places higher in the ranking than last year at the same time (from 11th to 6th) and in Davis he has won eight of the nine games he has played between the group stage and the qualifiers, defeating rivals such as Carlos Alcaraz, Alex De Miñaur or Lorenzo Musetti.
In the Finals held last week in Malaga he was, by far, the most decisive player of any team. And, almost above anything else, he has removed the aura of a losing tennis player, incapable of taking a step forward in moments of pressure (until Rotterdam had lost its first eight finals on the circuit). A chip change, a takeoff, which has coincided with the entry of Toni Nadal in his team.
Auger is aware of his progress, but also that he hasn’t reached the top yet, that the top doesn’t, in fact, exist. On Sunday, at the press conference after Canada’s victory in the Davis Cup Finals, he gave Djokovic an example, present in the stands of the Martín Carpena de Málaga. “I have many things to improve. We’ve seen Novak here. He’s still trying to get better to this day, and he’s won everything there is to win in this sport. Guys like him are role models. And me and all of us here always want to improve. That’s how I feel.” he assured before adding a touch of humor, unleashing general laughter: “Right now I am not going to think about what I have to improve, honestly I will leave it for next year”.
The Davis Cup was the finishing touch to the, the icing on the cake of a season that has shown that in Felix Auger-Aliassime, who already won the junior cup together with Denis Shapovalov, the man who has led Canada to the first Salad Bowl of his story next to him, there is a champion tennis player. “It’s great to be in this position now,” says Felix. As he says, this season has been “like coming full circle.”
