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Melbourne (AFP) – He couldn’t walk, but “as a boy” he always felt “capable of doing absolutely anything.” After eight Grand Slam titles and ten years in the elite of adapted tennis, the Argentine Gustavo Fernández faces a new season with the aim of “enjoying”.
A spinal cord heart attack with a year and a half to live left him paralyzed from the waist down, but that did not prevent him from following in the footsteps of his father, the basketball player Gustavo “Lobito” Fernández, and becoming a professional athlete, becoming an Argentine Paralympic standard bearer. in Rio-2016.
“I was very lucky to have a family that fully trusted me, in what I decided. If I wanted to do a certain thing, regardless of whether society was used to it or not, they had the intelligence and open-mindedness to say: try it.” .
“That’s how it all started. If they put the limit on you from the start, without trying it or not, it’s difficult for one to develop. My family always gave me the right to say: ‘do it, try it,'” he told the AFP the 29-year-old tennis player just turned, at the Australian Open.
His horizons were so broad that when a teacher asked the students at his school what they wanted to be when they grew up, he answered as a footballer. “Football player, obviously I couldn’t be, but neither the teacher, nor my mother, nor the people around were horrified.”
“As a kid I always felt capable of doing absolutely everything,” he recalls with a smile.
“All for tennis”
With dyed blonde hair, after a bet on the World Cup won by Argentina, the tennis player from Río Tercero, in the province of Córdoba, begins his tenth season in Melbourne, consecrated in the top 10.
With five individual Grand Slams and three doubles to his credit, “Gusti” faces the year with the intention of “continuing to grow” but above all with the aim of “enjoying”
“I really like what I do and many times, by being aware of the results, wanting to be number one, wanting Grand Slams, one loses sight of the most important thing,” he says.
During this time in the elite, Fernández has been a direct witness of the professionalization of wheelchair tennis, especially in its athletes and, although with “slower progress”, in the International Tennis Federation.
With a nutritionist, mental trainer, and kinesiologist, the preparation of this muscular tennis player, whose arm has nothing to envy to that of Rafael Nadal, is not far from that of another athlete.
“My day to day is absolutely like that of any professional tennis player: two or three hours of tennis, two hours in the gym, physical preparation, an hour and a half or two of kinesiology… It’s all in pursuit of tennis,” he says.
“What I have are fewer economic resources to do certain things as I would like,” he adds.
“Gap Too Big”
At the Australian Open, tennis singles draw winners earn A$2,975,000 (about US$2.1 million). The wheelchair tennis prize is set at A$100,000.
“It is clear that we cannot and do not want to charge the same as people who play standing, because we do not generate the same and probably never provide the same show, but the gap is too big,” he says.
“I don’t have the need to be rich, to have millions and millions, I don’t have that illusion. But I would like to have a little more stability. If I retire tomorrow, I have to go to work.”
After starting the year hospitalized with a throat infection, Fernández was solid in his debut on Tuesday against the Dutch Ruben Spaargaren (6-3, 6-2) and will face the Spanish Martín de la Puente, his teammate in the quarterfinals. doubles and rooms in Melbourne.
“It’s screwed up because I appreciate him very much (…) But it’s part of our profession,” says the Argentine.
Nor will it be something new for him who played doubles for years with the Japanese Shingo Kunieda, winner of 50 Grand Slams and his main rival in singles, who has just announced his retirement.
© 2023 AFP
