Though Turin had been projecting a 75% limit, the Italian authorities ultimately settled on 60%, which turned away hundreds of fans on short notice. Prize money was cut in half - from $14.5 million to $7.25 million - largely because of the reduced arena capacity.
The coronavirus pandemic made advance planning a challenge. There were certainly more significant issues, some beyond organizers’ control. 3 Zverev all reached the semifinals after coming through their round-robin groups, and all expressed satisfaction with their new playground even if Medvedev did grumpily and briefly compare it to a minor-league “challenger” event during his opening match when he had trouble getting the balls delivered to him at the pace he prefers before serving. Three of the past five ATP Finals champions - Grigor Dimitrov, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Alexander Zverev, who won in 2018 and again Sunday - have yet to win a Grand Slam title.īut with Nadal, Thiem and Roger Federer out of action for extended periods as they recover from significant injuries, Turin got the best of what was available. Rafael Nadal has never managed it, yet no one is about to take him off the short list of the game’s greatest players.
Winning is important for a champion’s legacy but not essential. An undefeated champion gets 1,500 ranking points: more than any tournament outside the Grand Slam events, whose champions get 2,000.īut the ATP Finals are still nowhere near as big a fishbowl. Only the top eight men qualify in singles, and it is a goal and talking point throughout the season as well as one of the biggest paydays and ranking boosts available. The ATP Finals is arguably the most prestigious annual men’s tennis event outside the four Grand Slam tournaments. That may be more challenging than they think. It was built to host ice hockey at the Winter Olympics in 2006, and Turin’s leaders were eager to rekindle the Olympic spirit and raise the city’s international profile with another significant sports event. But what gave it the edge for indoor tennis was the Pala Alpitour, the largest, most up-to-date indoor arena in Italy. Turin has its strengths: fine wine and food, an Egyptian museum, an elegant city center and the soccer club Juventus. Open champion Dominic Thiem).įiat, the carmaker that once dominated the city, has moved on, leaving an economic void. It has a tennis culture - clubs and courts are common - but does not have a regular men’s or women’s tour event and has never produced a major tennis star, although Lorenzo Sonego, 26, a Turin native currently ranked 27th, is training and playing hard to change that (he has victories over Djokovic and 2020 U.S. Though Turin is the capital of Italy’s Piedmont region, it is only the country’s fourth most populous city behind Rome, Milan and Naples. The ATP Finals were in London at the O2 Arena from 2009 to 2020, serving as an annual second helping of big-time tennis for a major city and major media hub that already had Wimbledon.īut Turin, the new host for a five-year run, is a very different and more risky play. Though there were some men’s tour executives who believed that it would have been a smarter growth strategy and safer financial decision to take the ATP Finals elsewhere - see Tokyo or Singapore - it is certainly in tune with the times that the tour’s year-end championship remained in Europe.
1 to 20-year-old Jannik Sinner of Italy at No. As the 2021 tour season ends, the top 10 in singles is exclusively European: from 34-year-old Novak Djokovic of Serbia at No.
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