The ATP tennis season is officially over and as we excitingly await 2024, we do an ATP End of Year Review 2023.
Now that the 2023 ATP season is over, let’s look back at the highlights of another incredible year on the tour.
Where do we begin? Last year, it well and truly looked like the end of the Big 3.
Djokovic won’t let go
The 2022 season marked the first without Federer and Djokovic only played a handful of events due to his COVID vaccination status. Nadal miraculously won two major titles but at the expense of career-threatening injuries which he struggled with throughout the year.
With the emergence of Carlos Alcaraz at the back of that year, the 2023 season was set up to be the inevitable passing of the torch.
There were glimpses of this; it looked like Alcaraz had snatched the torch off Djokovic at Wimbledon, when he came back to defeat the Serb in five sets.
However, Djokovic wouldn’t let go of the torch. Alcaraz may have had the spotlight, but it was Novak who remained as the undeniable world number 1.
For the fourth time in his career, the Serb collected three out of the four majors, won two Masters, racked up a tour-leading 17 top 10 wins, finishing the year with a win-loss record of 56-7.
For the tennis purists, Djokovic’s 2011 season is statistically his best ever, which included an astonishing 41-match winning streak, 10 titles, a 70-6 win-loss record and a 10-1 head to head against Federer and Nadal.
However, this year is almost as impressive given the circumstances. Gone are the days where Djokovic plays warm-up events, let alone tournaments outside of the Masters 1000 and Majors.
To go straight from winning the French Open on the clay courts of Paris to reaching the Wimbledon final on the grass of SW19 is no easy feat. For almost any other player, this would seem out of the ordinary. For Djokovic, it’s just the norm.
Sinner’s breakthrough
Beyond Djokovic’s brilliance this season, there are a few standout players who’ve made great strides in 2023.
The first player who comes to mind is Jannik Sinner. The 22-year-old capped off the year with a bang, winning 3 titles, including one Masters at the back-end of the season, and reached the ATP Finals in November (I don’t think I need to tell you who he lost out to in that particular final).
Sinner recorded a whopping 13 top 10 wins, which included two over Alcaraz and another two over Djokovic.
Sinner may not have as much flair and star appeal as his young rival Alcaraz, he is slowly reaching a level of tennis which rivals the Spaniard.
Zverev’s Return
If you’d asked me in 2017 if Alexander Zverev would have won a major title by 2023, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say yes.
After his heartbreaking loss to Thiem in the final of 2020 US Open, and then his horrific injury during his semi-final match against Nadal at the 2022 French Open, I questioned whether Zverev had missed his golden opportunity.
Zverev was an unknown quantity heading into 2023. Was he fully recorded from the ankle injury and could he compete with the so-called ‘New New Gen’ of Alcaraz, Sinner and Rune?
However, you can never write off a 5-time Masters and 2-time ATP Finals champion.
Exactly a year after sustaining his ankle injury, the German reached the semi-final of the 2023 French Open, 2 tour-level titles, defeated Jannik Sinner at the US Open and ended the year ranked inside the top 10.
Zverev’s determination to come back in the way he has is commendable.
If the former world number 2 is to win a major, he will almost certainly have to beat the likes of Djokovic, Medvedev, Alcaraz and Sinner along the way.
The good thing for Zverev is that he’s shown in the past he can compete against and beat all the names above. As they say, if you’ve done it once, you can do it again.
With a full block of pre-season training behind him, Zverev can certainly do it again.
What did you think of these key moments in our ATP End of Year Review 2023? Did we miss something? Let us know in the comments.
