Carlos Alcaraz: Firsts & Rising Star Moments

Everyone remembers their first time. Also in tennis. For Carlos Alcaraz, those first times have been accumulating since he started playing tennis like light signals until he was led to a garden in Melbourne, next to the Royal Exhibition Building, where the Murcian posed with the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup won on Sunday like someone completing an impossible album. There, at 22 years and eight months, the boy who learned to compete by chasing balls against a fronton completed the last card he was missing: the Australian Open. In Melbourne he added his last first time, the missing piece to complete the Grand Slam puzzle.

Alcaraz’s first performances already form an album that explains better than any treatise how a champion is built. The opening page was written in Rio de Janeiro, in February 2020, when a teenager of 16 years, nine months and 12 days defeated Albert Ramos and signed his first ATP victory. Nobody imagined then that that boy with the nervous smile was inaugurating a collection of milestones that would fall with an almost insolent naturalness.

The first title came a year and a half later, in Umag, on the same land that had shaped his tennis, against Richard Gasquet. He was 18 years old and had the audacity of someone who has not yet learned to fear. Months later he won the NextGen tournament in Milan against Sebastian Korda, a laboratory for budding stars that he outgrew from the first match.

The explosion of 2022

In 2022 the calendar became an escalator and a succession of baptisms. He made his Davis Cup debut in Marbella with Spain, beating Marius Copil in a tie against Romania and, just a few weeks later, he won his first Masters 1000 in Miami after beating Casper Ruud.

In Barcelona he won the first ATP 500 against Pablo Carreño and in Madrid he began to write a sentimental chapter: he defeated Rafa Nadal for the first time and, the next day, the number one, Novak Djokovic. He was just 19 years old and the tennis world was beginning to look at him with a mixture of amazement and generational envy. The boy who had grown up watching them on television began to call his idols. His consecration came in September of that same year with the conquest of the US Open. His first Grand Slam, another baptism in his record and again with Ruud on the other side of the net.

Then came new first times with the title at Wimbledon in 2023, with that electric pulse against Novak Djokovic on the grass of the All England Club, and Roland Garros 2024, where he tamed Alexander Zverev to reconcile with the Parisian clay of the Philippe-Chatrier and put another Spanish name – other than Rafa Nadal – in the Musketeers Cup for the first time. Each new first time seemed like a door opening to a bigger one.

The last first time, Melbourne 2026, had something of a literary closure. Djokovic, the same rival who had measured him on so many frontiers, witnessed the last step. At 22 years and eight months, the Murcian completed the big four map for the first time. However, his ambition has no limits as he demonstrated hours after his last feat: «Now that I have Australia I am already thinking about Roland Garros. “You don’t have to leave anything to anyone.” In his speech he already hinted at another possible first time, the most difficult of all: winning all four in the same course.

Each trophy is a premiere, as if Alcaraz needed to inaugurate tennis again on every surface and in every challenge. Alcaraz’s first times are not just an inventory of dates -Rio, Umag, Milan, Marbella, Miami, Barcelona, ​​Madrid, New York, London, Paris, Melbourne- but a story of accelerated learning that seems to have no end.