Quarter Recap 2024

It's been a while since my last blog, besides the tournaments I've been concentrating more on creating video content. There will be more to read here in the future as well as new content for the website, but for now have fun reading the quarter recap. 

It was quite an eventful first quarter of 2024, the tennis year began for me shortly after Christmas with the flight to the ATP in Hong Kong, and from Hong Kong I then went straight on to Adelaide and the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam of the year and the first Grand Slam of my career. 

In Adelaide, Constantin and I were able to reach the 3rd round, we first defeated the local matadors Saville/Bolt and then the top 10 ranked team Gonzales/Skuspi (reigning Wimbledon doubles champion) before we were eliminated against Escobar/Nedovesyov. The three other matches were great preparation for the Australian Open, we flew directly from Adelaide to Melbourne on Friday and then had a lead time of almost a week before our Grand Slam debut. In retrospect, despite the first round defeat against Arevalo/Pavic, it was very important to be there early. As a child you always dream of playing at the Grand Sams, so for the first few days you were a bit overwhelmed by the atmosphere and the size of the tournament, your subconscious plays tricks on you here and there and you realize that you are not as a fan but as Athlete is there.

Recently you were playing on Futures and suddenly you were sharing the locker room with Novak Djokovic and saw him regularly during the warm-up and in the players area. Even after several ATP tournaments, it was a new experience. Despite the many impressions, we showed a good and calm performance in the match, the nervousness disappeared in the first few points, unfortunately the opponents were a bit better in the end. After the eventful weeks we had to fly back for 14 hours to Doha followed by 6 hours to Frankfurt. Australia was cool but the trip was enough once a year. 

After a week's break and training we continued in Montpellier and Marseille, both ATP 250 tournaments. Here we were eliminated twice in the first round against the eventual tournament winners. Instead of making another long trip and hoping for a qualifying place in Acapulco, we decided to play a few Challenger tournaments in Europe. Also in order to gain more match practice again, in 2 we constantly reached finals and therefore always played a lot of matches. The many defeats in 2023 were unusual for our rhythm. Unfortunately, the match practice at the first Challenger backfired, with a first-round defeat in Cherbourg. A newspaper article from a relatively well-known newspaper then confirmed that we were in a crisis, certainly not a wave of success like last year, but we were still a bit away from a crisis. With the semi-finals in Pau and the final in Lugano we were able to collect points again and are now facing some big hits at the start of the clay court season. Challenger 2024 in Naples, ATP 125 in Estoril and probably the BMW Open in Munich (or the Tiriac Open ATP 250 in Bucharest), on clay we want to attack again and show good performances, with the big goal of being next season's highlight at Roland Garros to put exclamation marks.

That was a rough overview of the first quarter of 2024, the current one YouTube Video Q1 Recap I'll go into more detail about the impressions at the Australian Open and afterwards.

I also wish you a good start to the clay court season

With sporty greetings