At Indian Wells the Spaniard clearly disavowed the reservations of recent months.
In the end it arrived, linear, algorithmic, Carlos Alcaraz’s victory over Daniil Medvedev in the Indian Wells final. It came at the end of a tournament that tried in every way to mix the cards – the legendary bee disinfestations, the rains in the desert and last but not least, Luca Nardi beating Novak Djokovic – but which gave up in the end at the replay of the last final: 6-3 6-2 then, 7-6 (5) 6-1 today.
Although it was a comparison between the n. 2 and no. 4 in the world, the bookmakers’ predictions saw the Spaniard as a clear favourite. A sense of inevitability surrounded the reflections of the day before. This Alcaraz, on this surface – a “red concrete”, slow and abrasive and with high bounces – simply appeared unplayable for the Daniil seen during the tournament.
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As often happens to him, Medvedev had reached the end with his headlights off, without shining: in the quarter-finals he let Rune twist and give him the victory, in the semi-final he waited for Tommy Paul to run out of energy to beat him at distance. He was in the final, yes, but he would have played this match too underdog. As with Alcaraz in New York, when the blitz he had succeeded. As with Sinner in Australia, when the action plan applied in the first two sets ended up falling apart a few meters from the finish line.
At 28 years old, the Russian is a tennis player with a defined physiognomy, with his own place within the circuit. He took on a luxury third wheel role, embroidering on the ambiguity of a former number 1 and Slam champion who for some reason was always forced to play the part of the sacrificial victim. Emblem of the Next Gen era crushed between the Big Three and the new generational phenomena, underdog against these and those, it is always Medvedev who has to find a solutioninvent something to reverse the course of events, adapt, he, the self-proclaimed “cement specialist”to surfaces too ugly to be called such.
This sly search for a personal niche, for an alternative point of view on the tour, sometimes produces paradoxical short circuits. After the match with Alcaraz the Russian did not shy away from his usual dig at the slowness of the Indian Wells courts. “It’s a difficult place to play tennis,” he said with a smile on his face. A phrase that sounds ironically non-conformist, almost mockingly oppositional, if referred to Tennis Paradisethe Masters 1000 voted every year by tennis players as the best of the season.
Other times it seems that Medvedev just wants to take some pressure off himself. When they asked him how the match against Paul went and what he expected in the final, he suggested an almost offensive comparison: «I will beat him (Alcaraz, ed.) if I do a bit of what Tommy did today: find the lines and make great shots, get into his head…”. Translated: Alcaraz is so superior to me that he forces me to play full-arm, like Paul just did against me.
However, we were saying that the Spaniard started ahead, but it was clear to everyone. Effectively Alcaraz’s journey had been a crescendo: for a predestined person whom we had been struggling to recognize for months, a true viaticum of rebirth, not by chance officiated in the area of Palm Springs (a toponym with a strong symbolic value: «springs», but also «springs»), in the middle of a desert that Carlitos will have remembered a childhood place, the Iberian one of Tabernas not far from his native Murcia.
Having liquidated Arnaldi and Auger-Aliassime, Alcaraz took revenge on Marozsan, who had surprised him in Rome last year. Then, providentially stung by a bee, an insect close to the sacred for the Greeks (honey is the food of the gods, it is the bees of Crete that nourish little Zeus) and saved by an officiant of the cult armed with a vacuum cleaner (the now famous Lance Davis), he had easily disposed of Zverevbeaten 6-3 6-1 with 49% of return points – a meaningless figure given the quality of their opponent’s serve.
Then there was the semi-final with Sinner. The Sinner version Djoker of the last few months, the unscratchable cyborg with 36 victories in the last 38, the hardest of efforts for the Spanish Ercolino. A grumpy match, played in spurts, from which Alcaraz however emerged victorious: the false start after the interruption due to rain, the comeback in the second set, a third set that was never in question. The Sinner of recent months has been a nightmare for anyone, and Alcaraz himself had admitted that the Italian was playing as a no. 1 in the chest. Yet the Spaniard managed to take the most coveted scalp, even dominating for large stretches.
Indian Wells 2024 will also be remembered as the tournament in which the South Tyrolean’s streak of consecutive victories stopped at 19 (16 in the season). Unbeaten streaks are often a trap. The games pass and little by little that number is on everyone’s lips: that hypertrophic statistic takes over the game, it becomes the only thing that matters. At a certain point, like in Jenga, one can only anticipate the collapse of the tower. In the semi-final even a player considered indifferent to the media circus like Sinner had been affected by this fatalistic climate. In the third set he had fallen apart, he had lost the thread of his tennis. His forehand had abandoned him, his percentage of firsts had plummeted. Alcaraz instead appeared more confident than ever.
Suddenly we remembered that it wasn’t just Sinner and Sinner’s opponents who played tennis. The eclipse that has accompanied us since November has passed The Wimbledon winner has re-emerged from the cone of shadowthe youngest number 1 in history, the champion for whom up to 20, 30, 40 Slam tournaments were predicted a few months ago. How had we forgotten Spanish? There is no doubt that Alcaraz has been through a downturn.
This Indian Wells title is his first since the Championships. Since last August he has recorded eleven defeats. The decline in recent months has various contributing factors: physiological relaxation after the second Slam, precarious athletic conditions/physical problems (ankle injury during the recent South American tour), preponderance of indoor tournaments — not exactly the surface on which Carlitos would play the match of his life , despite already having a title in Bercy.
But the speed with which we felt obliged to downsize Spanish, the voracity with which we transformed a cloud into a crisis, a crisis into disavowal (“it’s not what it seemed”, “overrated”, “flash in the pan”) made us perhaps it says something about the restlessness of our times. Of this widespread tendency towards absolute judgments, of the anxiety of adapting our apodictic sentences to the results of the last month (of the last week), replacing a hyperbole with a hyperbole of the opposite sign. Last February the former n. 1 in the world Andy Roddick felt compelled to point out how Alcaraz’s service left something to be desired. How predictable his game was. His descent in the ranking seemed like a matter of weeks, even days.
Actually, with the Indian Wells victory Alcaraz reminded us that when he is well he is an unplayable tennis player for anyone, almost. Either you take it out of exhaustion (like Djokovic in Paris and Cincinnati last year, two matches marked by the Spaniard’s cramps) or you play at a pounding pace to take away his time, prevent him from breaking, keep him away from the baseline (to the Sinner). Alcaraz said he was always “nervous” before a match against the South Tyrolean, a symptomatic statement of his discomfort considering that it came after a semi-final won with merit.
When the suffocating solidity of Jannik forces him to think, Alcaraz appears confused, becomes disunited, asks Ferrero for clarification: the natural polyphony of his tennis transforms into a problematic range of predefined options. After the 6-1 in the first set, Sinner began to lose ground because he took a step back (also due to his opponent’s more elaborate shots), allowing Carlos to give full force to his tennis as a brilliant improviser, a game of jerks and embroidery, foil and katana.
In the final Medvedev tried to apply the same strategy. He gave up dribbling and concentrated his game on the two or three shots following the serve. There is something fascinating about the Russian’s willingness to question the very foundations of his tennis. He recently hired Gilles Simon as assistant coach to give Cervara some rest but above all to work, in his words, on the technical execution of individual shots. Against Alcaraz we saw him respond with his feet on the pitch at the opponent’s second, close the point with the volley, play serve & volley. In the interview after the match he half-jokingly declared that at 35 years old, why not, he could also decide to play only serves and volleys. We have seen him for years rowing from the tarpaulins, exiting and entering the frame, sending the ball back there with parabolic trajectories starting from who knows where.
Last Sunday Medvedev violated his game, he forced himself out of his comfort zone. Yet it wasn’t enough. In the first set he went up 3-0, wasted the 4-1 point with a double fault, and in the end lost the tiebreak 7 points to 5. Alcaraz always gave the impression of having his hands on the match, even when he was at a disadvantage. The fact that it was the Russian who worked overtime to stay in touch was then demonstrated by the second set, which ended 6-1: the initial ambush failed, Medvedev collapsed under the barrage of winners from the Spaniard. Alcaraz is back playing on a cloud: backhand passers in precarious balance, impossible recoveries with backs to the net, voluptuous stop volleys, lightning forehand crosses, solid serve, a champion performance in response. Everything we knew.
The Spaniard leaves California with his thirteenth ATP title and fifth Masters 1000 title in his pocket. At less than 21 years old, he has already collected 50 victories in this category of tournaments (only Nadal is better than him). These are numbers that don’t even need to be commented on. He leaves for Miami as n°1 of seeding (Nole will not be there) after having won very heavy victories against some of the hottest tennis players of the moment.
Then we will return to the beaten earth, and there could be pain for many, perhaps for everyone. Because Carlos Alcaraz has forcefully taken over the scene, and next time it will be impossible to question him.