Given its six-year status on the ATP Tour, the 500 series tournament in Rio de Janeiro is still in its relative infancy, perhaps explaining why no player has won there more than once. Dominic Thiem entered the field this week hoping to put an end to this pattern, having triumphed in the Brazilian capital in 2017. On paper, the Austrian was the overwhelming favourite even considering this would be his first clay court event of the season, and first time back on the match court since his agonising Australian Open final defeat to Novak Djokovic. His cause was also seemingly helped by the withdrawal of the previous two Rio champions; Diego Schwartzman and Laslo Djere, with the former being the only other potential competitor inside the top 20.
Before the tournament even started, there was debate as to the astuteness of Thiem’s decision to come to South America just for one week. Notwithstanding his loyalty to the event (he had played in every edition bar the first two), Thiem’s 2019 and subsequent Grand Slam final debut in Melbourne has arguably made him a bona fide member of the top 4 – and big name players don’t normally intersperse their schedule with a random clay court event. Perhaps it is easier to question Thiem’s decision-making given how the week panned out for him: dumped out in the quarter-finals after two unconvincing early round performances, where he dropped a set on each occasion (in the first round to Felipe Meligeni, a Brazilian wildcard outside the world’s top 350). As I will get onto later, it wasn’t just a case of Thiem playing at a subpar level but he did look well short of his best throughout the week and it will be interesting to see whether he will be come back to the jewel of the Golden Swing crown in future years.
An old cliché on the ATP Tour is that drawing a qualifier in the first round is never an easy match no matter the ranking, as they have the confidence of two match wins under their belts and are already accustomed to the playing conditions at that particular event. Nowhere was this adage more true than this week, as three of the four qualifiers reached the quarter-finals or further (on top of one lucky loser from the qualifying draw). Yet out of this group, no player took his opportunity more than Italian world number 127 Gianluca Mager, who made a shock run to the final. Mager fully deserved the 300-point privilege of this breakthrough berth, primarily due to the scope of his wins through the week; taking out last week’s Buenos Aires champion Casper Ruud in the first round, before claiming the prodigious scalp of none other than Thiem in the quarter-finals. Ironically, this was actually Thiem’s best match in terms of level through the week, but the Italian number 11 at times looked equivalent to the world number 11 in the way he executed his plan – rushing Thiem with his relentlessly aggressive gamestyle exemplified by his forehand, which was equally effective either flattened out into Thiem’s backhand corner or using the angles and width cross-court. However, arguably the most impressive aspect of Mager’s game this week was his mental strength: in how he immediately recovered to close out the match against Thiem (what would’ve been by far the biggest win of his career) after being broken serving for it at 5-4, or how he came back from 2-4 0-30 down in the deciding set of his semi-final match against Hungarian lucky loser Attila Balazs. His feat this week rockets him into the top 80 in the world rankings, which will hopefully give him multiple opportunities and the exposure to prove himself a mainstay on the ATP Tour.
Since this tournament was so dominated by qualifiers, it would not be fair to single out one player without mentioning the others. Challenger regulars Federico Coria and Pedro Martinez both enjoyed great weeks in reaching the quarter-finals, though if you had followed these players somewhat over the last six months, their respective successes would not be as surprising as they appear on paper. Coria (younger brother of Guillermo) started 2019 ranked 284 and his placement just outside the top 100 by the end of it is testament to his meteoric season on the Challenger Tour. Martinez had shown an impressive recent run of form, in qualifying for his last three events (the Australian Open, Cordoba and Buenos Aires) as well as winning a round in each, and was able to carry this forward with wins over fellow dirt aficionados Hugo Dellien and Pablo Andujar. Another interesting story to emerge this week was that of Attila Balazs. Pedro Sousa displayed last week in Buenos Aires how to maximise the fortune of a lucky loser spot, and Balazs followed his lead this week in reaching the semi-finals. Unlike the other two, Balazs’ form this week was a little more random – having not pulled up many trees since his first major breakthrough to the final of Umag last summer. Similar to the Cordoba champion Cristian Garin, Balazs twice recovered from poor starts to tough matches out; one of these being an impressive, crowd-silencing win over local favourite Thiago Monteiro on the Guga Kuerten centre court. Just as it was last year, the Rio Open seems to have established itself as an event where players can have career-defining weeks that take them on a steep trajectory up the rankings and out of the doldrums of the Challenger Tour.
Despite the number of shock runs this week, the eventual outcome was not particularly surprising. The look of childlike admiration on Cristian Garin’s face as he was hugged and presented the trophy by South American tennis legend Gustavo Kuerten was a great example of visceral emotion from a player, who, as one of the commentators aptly put it, sometimes resembles “a teenager who’s just been grounded by his parents” on the court. Similar to his triumph in Cordoba, Garin did not take the easy route to the finish line, but that falls in line with the week in general, with the tournament being severely hampered by rain to the extent that both semi-finals had to finished be off on Sunday. Notwithstanding the number of precarious situations Garin found himself in this week (taken to final sets in both his first round and quarter-final, as well as facing some explosive tennis in the final from Mager), his surge to the title never really seemed in doubt, especially upon Thiem’s exit from the draw. Already in his young career he has shown that he can stretch a run of form over multiple weeks; firstly in 2018 when he won three Challengers in a row across South America, before winning his first two ATP titles in 2019 within three weeks of each other in Houston and Munich. At times he was outclassed on the court, none more so than in the final against Mager, where the Italian brought out some of the most clean and crisp ball-striking and aggression in this Golden Swing, but Garin showed that heart and a strong mentality are the most powerful tools a player can have at their disposal. Comparisons to the great Brazilian are definitely far-fetched at this stage, but there is already a sense that Garin will be the leader of the next generation of young South American tennis stars.
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