Dice Casper Ruud (23):
-My youth idol was Nadal. I always wanted to imitate him.
And There you go.
As soon as he could, the Norwegian went to Nadal's academy in Manacor.
It happened four years ago, at the time that Nadal and his uncle Toni parted ways.
Rafael Nadal then incorporated Carlos Moyá into the team and Toni focused on school. And some international talent began to circulate there, promising people like Felix Auger-Aliassime, or like Casper Ruud.
From that experience, too, Ruud learned a few things. For example, where were the limits of it:
-Imitating Nadal was not the best idea, I realized over time, when I understood that his tennis was very physical, too much for me.
And now?
Now he has to deal with that, with Nadal's physique.
It will happen today, at 3 pm, when the Norwegian disputes his first Grand Slam final, precisely against Nadal and in Paris, what a ballot.
The challenge is enormous for him, and also for Norwegian tennis, which has never faced such a goal.
Who has been the best Norwegian tennis player so far?
Christian Ruud.
He is Casper's father. And also his coach (along with Pedro Clar, Ruud's adviser in Manacor). And in 1995 he had been 39th, his best historical ranking.
Another thing is the present, the present of Norwegian sport.
Little Norway (5.4 million inhabitants) has been offering magnificent sports flashes for some years. In athletics Jakob Ingebrigtsen shines, the great talent of the talented Ingebrigtsen family, with Henrik and Filip behind him. And Karsten Warholm, the fabulous hurdler, world record holder and Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo 2020, also shines.
In the triathlon they have Kristian Blummenfelt, a colossus who swims as much as he pedals but above all, he runs. The list of cross-country skiers and biathlon specialists is endless.
And in tennis, there is Casper Ruud (other Scandinavian phenomena emerge, not Norwegian, such as the Danish Holger Rune or the Swedish Mikael Ymer).
–Well, we Norwegians also have Ulrike Eikkeri: she is also face to face with one of the biggest commitments of her career –says Ruud when asking for a turn.
Refers to the finalist in the mixed doubles draw.
And the reader will have caught it. Ruud prefers to talk about others, not about himself.
Perhaps he plays that, to get out of the game and leave the leading role to others.
In fact, we had been able to verify something of this at the beginning of the tournament, also here in Paris: fortune had paired him with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a legend in the Bois de Boulogne, a man who had announced that he would leave the stage as soon as he lost at Roland Claws.
Tsonga had gone to lose to Ruud.
And in the celebrations for Tsonga, an extraordinary festival of speeches, applause and videos (the entire French school appeared, Murray, Federer or Nadal video chatted), the Norwegian escaped through gossip.
Well, he declares himself an antihero.
And actually, there is something of it: Ruud comes from his father, but his role in the current circuit is indeterminate, as if he were false. He does not belong to the Next Gen (where we have Medvedev, Tsitsipas, Zverev, Thiem or Shapovalov), and neither does he belong to the puppies that come from behind, the phenomenal Alcaraz, Rune, Sinner or Korda.
And your school?
It has already been said: what do we know about the Norwegian school?
What's more, who would have imagined that a Norwegian tennis player would become a phenomenon on clay?
(He adds eight titles in his career, seven of them on clay; something will have to do with his training at the Nadal academy: when he appeared there, in 2018, he barely entered the world Top 150, Monday will be the sixth … .)
-Ruud is the player with the most tennis on land that there is now -Moyá said yesterday,-. He plays an earthling game that tends to extinction. Now that tennis has become uniform on all surfaces, due to the conditions of the balls or the baseline game, Ruud seems made for the clay. He is a man of long rallies.
–And do you see him capable of imposing himself?
-Man, this is not the easiest place to dispute your first final of a major. He has Nadal in front of him, with his epic. Although I don't want to count on the epic, but on his game and I beat it from him.
(...)
The last thought is important. In his eventful semifinal against Zverev, the experts had detected a leak in Nadal's game.
They saw him suffer.
"I didn't have them all with me, really," said Moyá. We suffered because we saw him suffer. It was necessary to pull epic, especially in the first set. The physical slump of the second sleeve was not usual either. Other times she recovers sooner. Let's see how to get to this Sunday.
