Winning your first Grand Slam is a breakthrough moment for any young tennis player. It should be more so in this era of men’s tennis where...
Winning your first Grand Slam is a breakthrough moment for any young tennis player. It should be more so in this era of men’s tennis where the dominance of legends and inconsistency of the chasing pack has made a first-time champion a rare commodity.
But it has proven to be quite the challenge for Dominic Thiem, who became the first male player born in the 1990s to win a Grand Slam at the depleted US Open last year but has stumbled since.
Once the heir-apparent to Rafael Nadal on clay, the two-time Roland Garros runner-up was knocked out in the first round in the biggest upset of the opening day in the 2021 edition. The fourth seed blew a two-set lead to go down to 35-year-old Pablo Andujar 4-6, 5-7, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 in a match that lasted four-and-a-half hours. He was unable to hold off the challenge from the world No 68, who had never beaten a top-five player or won from two-sets down before. It was a shocking spiral.
At any other Grand Slam, Thiem’s first-round exit would have perhaps been understandable. In any other year, his earliest exit at French Open could have been seen as an anomaly.
But for the 2018 and 2019 finalist, losing in...
