The Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz will start the 2026 season with the aim of completing his particular Grand Slam, achieving victory at the Australian Open, the first ‘great’ of the course and the only one he has left to place in his showcases, with the quarterfinals of 2024 and 2025 being his two best participations in the tournament.
2026 is set to be a year full of challenges for Carlos Alcaraz. For the first time since he became a professional, he will not have Juan Carlos Ferrero sitting in his box. And the first litmus test to see how the Murcian reacts to his absence will be in what is, as he has recognized, his main challenge in the next season: the Australian Open.
The Australian ‘great’ is the only one of the four ‘Grand Slam’ who continues to resist the world number one. In fact, he is the only one of the four in which he has never even been among the four best players in the tournament, with the quarterfinals reached in 2024 and 2025 being his best result on the courts of Melbourne Park. A territory where his great rival, Jannik Sinner, has dominated the last two years, who will seek his third consecutive title.
The one from San Cándido is the great dominator on the hard court and has only lost one Grand Slam match on that surface, the US Open final against, precisely, ‘Carlos Alcaraz’. That match would mark the third consecutive final between the two in a tournament of this entity, and the second that would fall to the Spanish side.
Now, Melbourne is preparing to see for the first time the duel that has marked recent years on the tennis circuit, also encouraged by the apparent lack of rivals given that age already seems to take its toll on Novak Djokovic, surely facing his last opportunity to achieve his twenty-fifth ‘big’ title, and that only the American Taylor Fritz is emerging as a possible real threat waiting for a new resurgence of the German Alexander Zverev.
If Alcaraz achieved his goal on February 1, raising his first Australian Open to the sky, he would become the ninth male tennis player to win the four majors. Something that in the 21st century only the members of the ‘Big Three’, Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic, have been able to achieve. Furthermore, on the women’s circuit, 10 tennis players have also achieved it throughout history, with Maria Sharapova being the last to enter that select group.
The one from El Palmar and Sinner established themselves in 2025 as the great dominators of the men’s circuit, sharing the ‘big four’ for the second consecutive year and once again opening a big gap between their rivals. In total, they took 14 titles between them out of a total of the 22 that are disputed throughout the year between ‘Grand Slam’, Masters 1000 and ATP 500. A gap with the rest that is evident in the ranking where both have more than 6,000 points ahead of the rest.
In fact, in 75 percent of the tournaments they have played, both have been the protagonists of the final and a balance of 4-2 in favor of the Spaniard. In this sense, Novak Djokovic deserves special mention as he was, along with Sinner, the only one to reach the four ‘Grand Slam’ semi-finals.
SINNER ALSO AIMS FOR THE ‘GRAND SLAM’
A season that set the bar very high for 2026 for Alcaraz, who surely had the best season of his career. The Murcian closed 2025 with the highest number of trophies (8) and victories (71), and with the lowest number of defeats (9) in a calendar year. In fact, he played in the final in 11 of the 16 tournaments he participated in, falling before the quarterfinals only in the Masters 1000 in Miami and Paris.
Until 2025, the Murcian’s best season on the circuit had been 2023, in which he achieved 65 victories and 12 defeats to win six titles, although only one ‘Grand Slam’, and, in addition, his winning percentage was 88 percent. All of this allowed him to close the year as number one in the world, a position in which he has already accumulated 52 weeks and which he hopes to maintain as long as possible to sneak into the historical ‘Top 10’ of permanence that has 28 more (Lleyton Hewitt), with the desire to finish at the top again, something that he could not achieve in 2023 after finishing as the ‘king’ in 2022.
And if Alcaraz’s first big objective is to complete his ‘Grand Slam’, the second will be to prevent Jannik Sinner from doing so. The Italian only needs to win the Roland Garros title, the second ‘big’ title of the year, which the Murcian has won in the last two editions. Thus, a third consecutive crown on Parisian soil, something that has only been within the reach of Bjorn Borg and Rafa Nadal, would postpone the Italian’s milestone for another year.
With information from EUROPA PRESS
