New York bids farewell to Dominic Thiem, the man who raised the title in the cursed year of the pandemic and, also, the tennis player who was left halfway between what he has been and what he could have been by a cursed wrist. A magnificent career, no doubt, but surely inferior to what he could have had if he had not had to face the tortuous joint problem, which was wreaking havoc on the tennis and the spirit of the Austrian, who is now saying goodbye to the big stages and at the end of the year he will say goodbye to his sport. A real shame. With 17 titles in his bag, the aforementioned major Having achieved this in Flushing Meadows and three other important finals, Thiem closes his career with resignation and also relief: finally, the ordeal is over.
“I feel like it’s the right time to stop,” he says after losing to local player Ben Shelton (6-4, 6-2, 6-2). “I’ve had a very intense career and I don’t feel like I’m 31, but I feel older, tennis-wise. I’ve never felt like I used to, especially with my right hand and a series of strokes that I haven’t been able to recover from,” he adds, referring to that progressive decline and the impossibility of getting back on track, once his right wrist creaked and began to fail (2021), and kept him out of action for almost two years; then he returned, but his feelings did not improve. Uncertainty and fear persisted, and despite having managed to avoid surgery, he never became the same player who dazzled with his deadly hitting before the injury.
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In terms of power and aggression, there are few like him in recent times. “I competed against the best in history and the pressure I put on myself to reach that level and maintain it contributed to the injury, there is no doubt. I trained with a very high intensity for many years and the doctors have told me that I broke my wrist because of all the training I did, all the punches I executed and the hard work I put in during those years,” he recently detailed in an interview with the Austrian media. The pressThiem rubbed shoulders with all of them, and he beat all three: Rafael Nadal six times, Roger Federer five times and Novak Djokovic as many times. He became number three in the world and the most real threat to the king of clay.
Methodical, physically powerful and hardened by the strict military manual of Günter Bresnik, who transformed a young scrawny boy into an elite athlete based on sessions in which the tennis player lifted stones and 25-kilo logs, Thiem revealed himself as a fierce competitor who not only challenged Nadal on the Chatrier, where the Spaniard beat him in the finals of 2018 and 2019, but also achieved a remarkable performance on a fast court. He lost in the Australian final of 2020 against Nole, but made up for it a few months later in New York, which now gives him a warm ovation in his last step in a major. The Austrian deserves it, respected in the locker room and who since his comeback – invitations and more invitations, given that he disappeared from the top 100 of the ranking— He honored his extreme professionalism. He tried until the end.
In the midst of a rather conformist generation, cowering in the face of the power of the giants, he rebelled. He worked tirelessly and evolved. Violence in his shots and a double register: pronounced topspin on sand and a flat, deep ball on hard court. From the school of one-handed backhands, he defeated Federer in the 2019 Indian Wells final and could well have become a master, but Tsitsipas and Medvedev stood in the way. Paradoxically, the triumph four years ago at the Arthur Ashe drained him from an emotional point of view due to overexertion and then came the misfortune of the injury, which has finally cut the wings of a player who leaves early but satisfied. He did not spare a single gram of effort. But from wanting to improve so much, from such intensity, he broke.
“I’ve known him since he was little, because he was born in 1993 as well, and when we played in juniors he was an average player, but then he had a big boost and started hitting the ball very hard,” says Roberto Carballés. “At first we thought he was a bit over the top, because he didn’t hit them all, but then he reached an incredible level,” adds the Granada native; “from what he says, he has done old school training, very jevis and hitting it very hard, and that is something that if you don’t control it, it can become dangerous.”
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