The reality is that when these great champions appear at an early age it is exciting to see how they are able to evolve in their game. It is clear that they have come this far by improving their performance, but suddenly, installed in the elite, they show that the capacity for learning is still wide.
I remember that I was once asked to write an article about Messi and to try to explain what made him different from other players. Obviously, the first thing I thought was that to try to explain all this, it would be necessary to write a book in which there would be very varied chapters. But undoubtedly, one of the most important would be about the ability to learn.
All this comes to a head because in my WhatsApp group of tennis fans, commenting on the great victory of Carlos Alcaraz against Djokovic in the Wimbledon final, I wrote "The man who learned while sleeping". Then one of my colleagues told me it would make a good headline for an article. My reasoning was based on the fact that the evolution in three weeks of Alcaraz's game on grass is incomprehensible. He started the Queens tournament with doubts, overcame great players much more adapted to this surface and finished it off with victory over Djokovic, we are not able to understand how he can evolve so quickly.
If we observe the activity of Alcaraz during those weeks, we understand that there are some hours dedicated to competing and surpassing your rivals, there are other hours to try to evade the responsibility that comes with being the favorite to reach number one and winning tournaments, there is a long time that you spend resting, training, giving interviews, the time required for lunches and dinners... In other words, it seems that there is little time left to analyze which aspects need to be developed, because the meetings with your technicians are also intended to take advantage of the opponent's possible weaknesses. And, in addition, we must understand that analyzing how your game should evolve does not mean learning, but even being key, only the important aspects are being pointed out.
That's why I can only understand that learning takes place while sleeping. A moment when the accumulated experiences added to the ambition to improve force the brain to work from the subconscious. In which the neurons move from one side to another to generate the necessary information so that your body is then able to reproduce what has simply been visualized mentally. There may be those who think that I may have gone off the deep end. But it's a subject that intrigues me, because having been a professional athlete, I experienced firsthand the difficulty of not only learning, but even daring to do it, when everything around you moves to high speed
