Rafael Nadal He already has a confirmed rival for his debut in the Rome Masters 1000. The Manacorí, former No. 1 in the ATP world ranking and currently ranked No. 305, will face a tennis player who never broke into the Top 100 but who is the best racket in his country: Zizou Bergs.
Zizou Bergs will be Rafael Nadal’s next rival at the Rome Masters 1000. EPA
Originally from the city of Lommel (Belgium), The current number 108 in the rankings is named after one of the legends of world football: Zinedine Zidane. The French star, who played professionally between 1989 and 2006 and was world champion with the French National Team in 1998, is nicknamed “Zizou.”
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However, the big question is: How did their parents choose to give them this curious nickname as their first name? The answer is given by his father, Koen, who revealed that in his adolescence he played on a team with friends in which each one had a name of a famous player such as Pelé, Maradona, Platini or Zidane himself.
When the time came for the birth, Koen and his wife (Anne-Mie) thought they were going to be parents to a girl. Without a name for a boy, Zidane’s nickname appeared: “How about Zizou?”
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In addition to this curiosity, Mountain He also does charity work on the African continent. When at age 15 he had an eye-opening trip in Burundidecided to help them from his small place. “We are not always aware of it, but you have a lot and sometimes you feel like you have little. You grow up in a very good culture, in a very good country and you think that everything is quite normal, that you have all these clothes, shoes, rackets, that you can string whenever you want and have good food on the table every day. That’s not common there, it really opened my eyes. They played with my things, even if they were five sizes too big, they still played with them. “That really moved me,” she told the ATP in an interview.
At the tennis level, the Belgian Zizou has, in the last year and a half, a great performance on the Challenger circuit. Between January 2023 and May 2024 he became champion in Tallahassee (twice), Drummondville and Yokkaichi. Furthermore, he had his debut in the main draw of the Australian Open, having played in two of the four majors throughout his career (in 2022 he did it at Wimbledon).
As an ATP player, he was only victorious in five matches. The first of them was against Albert Ramos-Viñolas (Antwerp 2020), then against Oscar Otte (Gstaad 2021), later against Laslo Djere (Gstaad 2023), Jurij Rodionov (Gstaad 2023) and Patrick Kypson (Houston 2024). Can he surprise in Rome and defeat Rafael Nadal?
2024-05-07 19:06:56
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