What if Carlos Alcaraz is asking for help? What if the 21-year-old Spaniard is saying, without knowing he’s saying it, that he needs good tips, a series of in-depth conversations that will allow him to broaden and change his perspective?
But before we get into that: Carlos Alcaraz is a crack, a unique tennis player. He could lose every match he plays until the end of the season and that statement would not change. Nor would it change the fact that his 2024 is any player’s dream: two Grand Slam titles and an Olympic silver medal.
But when an ambitious and delightful athlete like Alcaraz, touched with the magic wand, smashes his racquet with the anger and frustration seen in Cincinnati and then self-flagellates to gaudy extremes in the press conference following his second-round exit at the US Open, the legitimate impression is that something major is going on in his head. Something that he is not managing to control and that he cannot solve with the tools he has used so far.
It is thus conceivable that he is asking for help, even if he does not know it himself.
Comparing Alcaraz to Rafael Nadal is commonplace and makes perfect sense. There are many points of contact in the explosion of both Spaniards into the limelight. But there are also important differences.
Nadal was (is) allergic to the show, while Alcaraz loves it, seeks it as if he had been born in New York instead of Murcia. Alcaraz has said more than once that, in addition to winning the point, he wants to win it spectacularly, he is convinced that this is his mission, that he is not complete as a tennis player if he does not drive the spectators crazy with those magical shots that he occasionally takes from a racket transmuted into a galley.
Another difference with Nadal is that in 2005 the world of social networks did not exist. The Mallorcan was followed tournament by tournament, in essentially analogue coverage, in the written press and on radio, with television as a guest. Alcaraz, on the other hand, is followed match by match, set by set, point by point, frame by frame. The pressure he is under at the age of 21 is not normal, although he has grown up in that world and says he enjoys it.
A few months ago, former US skier Lindsey Vonn told the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that if she could ask Artificial Intelligence (AI) for anything, it would be to clean up its networks of ‘haters’, of aggressive and poisoned messages. She was told that yes, that is underway.
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Alcaraz does not seem to be worried about the haters, who also exist in his case. But something worries him, something twists in his being until it manifests itself in the form of cramps, shattered racquet or the feeling of not being able to hit the ball well ever, which is what he said happened to him on Thursday night when he lost 6-1, 7-5, 6-4 to Dutchman Botic van de Zandschulp.
‘It was a fight against myself. Today I played against my opponent and also against myself in my head. There were a lot of emotions that I couldn’t handle,’ he said.
‘Mentally I am not well,’ he added.
Alcaraz has already sent his message, you could almost say he is shouting it out. It remains to be seen who is listening.
