Nov 27, 2023, 16:45 ETHyeon Chung celebrating victory after being crowned champion of the Next-Gen Finals 2017. Getty
Hyeon Chung I was called to fight for everything. Young, athletic and talented. He quickly became the great promise of Asian and world tennis. The Korean, in 2014, took his first steps on the circuit when he was only 16 years old. The rise was meteoric. In his first season, he already won a Challenger title. In the next, he added four more trophies to his display cases. The step towards the highest level of tennis came as quickly as naturally.
He played his first Grand Slam in 2015, comfortably ranked among the top 100 rackets in the world and won the ATP award for “most improved player of the year” after rising more than 120 places during the season. In 2016 he could not compete too much due to some physical discomfort, but in 2017 he recovered and in what way. He continued winning Challenger titles but also gave successes at the ATP level. Chung was the rival that every opponent wanted to avoid. To cap another great season, he won the first edition of the Next Gen ATP Finals after defeating Andrey Rublev in the definition.
2018 started in an unbeatable way. At the Australian Open, he gave the biggest blow of his tennis life after defeating Novak Djokovic in the round of 16 (to this day, he is the last player to have beaten the Serbian in that competition). He ended up losing in the semifinals, but the promise of a great player was already a reality. Top 20 in the ranking and with only good things to come.
However, the rise was as fast as the fall. The motives? The damn injuries. His back, from that same year, did not leave him alone. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Surgery involved and all kinds of treatments that did not work.
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This is how, after a tumultuous attempt to return to the circuit in 2019, he played his last official match on September 29, 2020… until 2023 arrived. More than two years unemployed (with the pandemic in the middle) and without lots of news about that young star.
On April 26 of this year he competed again. He was invited to the Seoul Challenger and failed against Jordan Thompson. Another invitation earned him a contest in Busan, also in Korea, and with the same result.
“I would like to give myself all the credit in the world for finishing the game without any discomfort or injury, and last but not least, for having given everything until the last point.”he said after his return to the fields.
He subsequently competed on the grass tour at the Surbiton, Nottingham and Ilkley Challengers, but with negative results in all three tournaments. They were falls against Andy Murray, Nuno Borges and Jesper de Jong respectively. His last performance in singles took place in the Wimbledon qualifiers, an event in which he only won the first match (vs. Dimitar Kuzmanov) and then retired from the match against Enzo Couacaud after a 6-1 and 2-0 loss due to of a new injury.
The physical problems continued to threaten the career of the South Korean, who is currently 27 years old and only has eight ATP points, which places him in position 1092 in the world ranking. However, after that injury at Wimbledon, nothing more was known about who was one of the young revelations of tennis in the last decade.
2023-11-27 21:45:00
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