"It is very, very possible that [Carlos] Alcaraz ends this year as the number 1 in the world," warned Jim Courier during the broadcast on Tennis Channel of the final of the Mutua Madrid Open and it seems like a safe forecast, but who would have said it ago a few months
Last New Year's Eve, Alcaraz was number 32 in the ATP ranking.
Today he is the sixth and the rise, as Courier predicted, is unstoppable.
After his victories at the Masters 1000 in Miami and Madrid, one on cement and the other on clay, the only question really is when the Spaniard will enter the fight for the top spot on the list.
The answer is that he still needs a few months.
With his resignation from the Masters 1000 in Rome, an idyllic future in which Alcaraz is capable of winning everything, Roland Garros and Wimbledon, would place him in that position already in July, but his experience on grass does not allow such a high flight.
In his entire career, he has only played two matches on this surface, both last year at Wimbledon, logically a win and a loss.
In the first round he beat Japan's Yasutaka Uchiyama in five sets and then fell uncontested to Daniil Medvedev.
For this reason, a more realistic calculation would place the prodigy in the best positions in the ATP ranking at the end of the summer.
Then he could have already signed a good role at Roland Garros -where he would add a whopping 1,885 points if he wins the title-, improved his numbers at Wimbledon and enjoyed a cement American tour with everything to conquer.
Last year he did not play the Toronto Masters 1000 and fell in the first round at the Cincinnati Masters 1000 so again his chances of scoring points are enormous.
In the last week of August, when the US Open begins, Alcaraz could already be ready to storm the skies, although in Flushing Meadows he must defend a quarterfinal, the result that revealed him to the general public.
While working on that promotion, yes, Alcaraz is already in the highest positions of the 'Race', the list that measures the best tennis players of the year and that decides who will go to the ATP Finals in November.
Currently the young man is second (3,460 points) just 70 points behind a well-known Rafa Nadal (3,530 points), who has dominated that ranking since his victory at the Australian Open.
Somewhat far from the two is Stefanos Tsitsipas and already very far, Andrey Rublev and Daniil Medvedev.
The one who does not even appear in the Top 25 of the 'Race' is Novak Djokovic, who has barely been able to play due to his opposition to getting vaccinated against covid and sooner rather than later he will lose number 1 in the ATP ranking.
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