Alcaraz’s only and remote chance to end 2023 as the world No. 1
The Spaniard lost almost all of his chances to top the ATP rankings at the end of the year after losing in the first round in Paris.
Carlos Alcaraz is taking a break after a long season and quite a few wars with some of the best players in the Tour in the most important tournaments.
The Murcia native admitted after losing to Roman Safiulin in the opening round of the Paris-Bercy Masters that he needed to take a rest, saying he wasn’t feeling as fresh as he used to and that his footwork and movement were not as good as expected on the court.
As it happened at the end of 2022, Alcaraz seems to be suffering the consequences of a stacked calendar, but also the physical and probably also mental fatigue of a year full of intense games.
After back-to-back losses to Grigor Dimitrov in Shanghai and to Safiulin in the French capital, the 20-year-old star realized that the best decision was to take some days off to come back stronger and ready to fight for the ATP Nitto Finals title.
A very remote chance of recovering the No. 1 spot
Alcaraz has never won the ATP Finals, which is considered to be the most prestigious tournament after the four majors, as only the best eight players of the year can participate in the event.
However, one of the two-time Grand Slam tournament champion’s main goals was to finish 2023 as the world No. 1, something that now seems almost impossible, especially after Novak Djokovic won his seventh title in Paris.
The Serb, who will be dropping 1,500 points at this stage of the season -including the maths after winning Paris (finalist last year) and the ATP Finals (champion in 2022), will have 9,945 points. Alcaraz is sitting second in the rankings with 8,455, which is a 1,490-point difference.
Every win in the Nitto Finals’s round robin, which consists of three games, is rewarded with 200 points. If Alcaraz manages to get to the final he would receive 400 more, and if he ends up lifting the trophy in the final, it’s another 500.
In other words, if Carlitos wins all the matches in the tournament, he would get a total of 1,500 points, so taking into consideration that Nole is 1,490 ahead of him, that means that the 24-time major winner should, at the same time, lose all of his games in the event, which seems pretty unlikely. Both players will feature in two different groups, so they won’t face each other, at least, in the first three matches of the tournament.