On the afternoon of June 9, Carlos Alcaraz was dejected. Sitting in the locker room at Roland Garros, the Murcian shook his head: he still couldn’t believe what had just happened to him. He was disappointed in himself. He felt that his mind had betrayed him. But There, sunk in the catacombs of Philippe Chatrier, Carlitos began to win Wimbledon. He didn’t know it yet.
“Carlos, you’re not perfect.”he listened while chewing a very hard defeat. “Carlos, you are not a robot”that voice added. “Carlos, you are not a machine”. The speaker was one of his most trusted people, Juanjo López, his doctor. “You have the right to fail, this is a learning experience”. But Carlitos was in another world. The explanation must be sought a couple of hours before on the clay of Roland Garros.
Fighting for a place in the Grand Slam final, His mind stiffens before the immensity of Novak Djokovic and his body abandons him. With 6-3, 5-7 and 1-0 on the scoreboard, maximum equality after almost two and a half hours of tremendous battle, Alcaraz subtracts with his right foot and the ball stays in the net. Immediately He puts his hand on his right calf. The doctor asks. He tends to her arm and then her legs. He’s totally freaked out. And it is not a physical issue: everything comes from above, from the head. “It’s here, here, here, here, here, here, here…” he says at one point during the game, pointing out all the parts of his body that hurt.
“I know, Juanqui, I know, I know. But it’s too early to retire,” Carlitos shouts at Juan Carlos Ferrero, who is in his box, while the doctor massages his thighs on the court. But there is no turning back: he delivers the last two sets 6-1 and 6-1 and He leaves the center court of Roland Garros with a very painful defeat in his backpack. The kind that is hard to digest. He leaves Paris with a lesson well learned: Djokovic is another dimension, against Nole you can’t be nervous.
That semi-final, Carlitos’ first in Paris, perfectly summarizes what tennis 2023 has been like for several reasons: Alcaraz and Djokovic are the two great protagonists of the course; It’s Nole holding back the generation of the future; They are a Roland Garros semi-final and Nadal is not there, injured and absent. It’s all too symbolic.
The seven minutes that left Carlitos frozen
The immediate conclusion that the Alcaraz team reached that same afternoon is that, beyond the heat and the wear and tear of the match, this time it was something mental. It is what his doctor Juanjo López describes as “psychological cramp.”
“The psychological stress in tennis is maximum. I remember seeing Berasategui play the Roland Garros final with cramps. He had to retire super young because of those cramps. That mental stress affects you,” the doctor analyzed a few days later on Murcian television. “Those cramps come from relaxation. After a second set of great tension and wear and tear, Djokovic called for a medical timeout and then went to the bathroom. There were seven minutes in which Carlitos was sitting, he was relaxing. We always ask you to activate for a minute or two. As she wore a lot of set wear, she relaxed.”
While Alcaraz’s head is boiling in the locker room after the defeat, on the upper floor of the locker room, in the players’ restaurant, the Murcian’s family is calm. The grandfather, Carlos, the one with the motto “head, heart and balls” buys a ‘KitKat’ for Jaime, Carlitos’ little brother. And the player’s parents sit at a table on the terrace and receive a warm hug from Goran Ivanisevic. “The boy has lost a Roland Garros semifinal against Djokovic, that’s it,” they say, trying to see the positive. That there is. And a lot. “He’s going to learn a lot from this, everything he’s experienced throughout the entire tournament is going to come in handy.”
Wimbledon revenge
““I have never felt so much tension as today.”, Alcaraz adds practically simultaneously in the official press conference. “It is not easy to play against Novak, he is a legend, if someone says that they go out to play without nerves against him, they are lying. You have nerves because you are in the semis of a Grand Slam, but even more so because Novak is the one in front. The next time I face him I hope it will be different, but the nerves will still be there“.
No sooner said than done. Alcaraz is so beast, his rise is so meteoric, that a few weeks later he takes revenge against the most successful tennis player of all time. He does it no less than on the center court of the All England Club and in the Wimbledon final, in Nole territory.
That victory, the most important of his career so far, comes by surprise: Nobody counted on him for the grass and nobody thought that, once in the final, he could rise from the 6-1 that Djokovic gave him in the first set of the final. But it’s Carlitos. This time there were no nerves. There were no more cramps.
Nacho Encabo is a sports editor at Relevo, a specialist in tennis and the Olympic Games. Born in Madrid, he studied Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Rey Juan Carlos University and began as an intern in the sports section of El Mundo in 2011. Knowing German shortly after opened the doors of the dpa agency, where he worked as a special envoy to the 2012 London Olympic Games and the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, the 2016 Euro Cup in France and the 2018 World Cup in Russia. In addition, adding Relay and the rest of his career, he has covered the four Grand Slams of tennis, the Davis Cup , athletics world championships, Formula 1 Grand Prix and countless LaLiga and Champions League matches. He has also worked as a reporter at El Independiente and traveled to the Tokyo Olympics on the Spanish Olympic Committee team. …
2023-12-23 06:17:53
#robot #Carlos #Relief
