PARIS – There he is Carlos Alcaraz. At the top of a Grand Slam draw for the first time as the No. 1 seed.
He would have been there at the Australian Open in January if not for a leg injury suffered in practice in one of his last tuneups before he was supposed to get on the plane in Spain.
But he returned to the tour in February in fine fettle. There have been a few down days, like his opening-round shocker in Rome against qualifier Fabian Marozsan who gave the young Spaniard a dose of his own drop shots. But on balance, Alcaraz has done a remarkable job of avoiding a letdown in 2023 after his big-bang breakthrough in 2022 when he won five tournaments, including his first major at the U.S. Open, and became the youngest men’s No. 1 in ATP history at age 19.
It has all happened very quickly, as it often does with the great ones. Nonetheless, his team members are looking just a bit shaken by the speed of the ascent and the intensity of the interest in him.
In Indian Wells, in the absence of Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, he was the main attraction and still managed to fill the main stadium for most of his matches and also take the title. In Spain, where he won in Barcelona and Madrid, El Pais, the country’s most august daily news outlet, deployed the term “Alcarazmania”. At the end of 2021, he was known by 29 percent of Spaniards, according to a survey by Popularity Media. Last month, that figure was 72 percent (Nadal, for comparison’s sake, is at 98 percent, which makes you wonder where those other 2 percent have been the last 20 years).