Ten Things To Look Forward To In Tennis in 2024

For his final end-of-year piece, Martin Keady, our resident tennis historian, looks forward to next season.

Ten Things To Look Forward To In Tennis in 2024

1.The Return of Rafa

Rafael Nadal is scheduled to return to the ATP Tour any day now, in the run-up to the Australian Open. Whether that leads to more Major Singles titles to add to his already staggering total of 22 (making him second only to Novak Djokovic in the battle to be the GOAT) or is simply the beginning of a farewell world tour, as Nadal himself has already hinted could be the case, it will still be fabulous to see the great Spaniard back on court. And if he could somehow recover both fitness and form sufficiently to win a 15th French Open in Paris, that would surely be the perfect moment for him to bow out, safe in the knowledge that it is one sporting record that will probably never be matched, let alone beaten.

1. Novak Djokovic Becoming The First Tennis Player To Win 25 Major Singles Titles

Of course the biggest obstacle to Nadal winning another Major is his greatest nemesis, Novak Djokovic, who has already surpassed his total of 22 Major Singles titles. Indeed, Djokovic has now won a total of 24 Major Singles titles after winning every Major in 2023 except Wimbledon, and he is the firm favorite to win an 11th Australian Open title next month. If he does so, he will become the first tennis player, male or female, to win 25 Major Singles titles, which might be another record that would stand for decades, if not all time.

1. The Continuing Tussle To Be Women’s World No.1

For so long, men’s tennis has been dominated by “The Big Three,” who, in the shape of Novak Djokovic, are fast becoming The Giant One. By complete contrast, women’s tennis for the last half a decade or so has been far more unpredictable, first with Serena Williams trying (and ultimately failing) to match Margaret Court’s record of 24 Major Singles wins, then the brief interregnum of Ash Barty and, after Barty’s shock retirement in 2022, the emergence of Iga Świątek as a new and seemingly dominant World No.1. Fortunately for women’s tennis and its fans, Świątek has not been as utterly dominant as had been feared, as proven by the fact that there were four different winners of the women’s Majors in 2023. In 2024, Świątek will be challenged more than ever by Aryna Sabalenka (who briefly replaced her as World No.1 in 2023), Elena Rybakina and Coco Gauff, who are all now Major-winners themselves, suggesting that there could be a four-way fight in 2024 for the title of world’s best female tennis player.

1. Jannik Sinner Challenging For Majors

Jannik Sinner will surely hope that the Davis Cup will do for him in 2024 what it did for Novak Djokovic in 2011, namely acting as the perfect springboard from team success to individual Major glory. Djokovic had actually won a Major before he led Serbia to the Davis Cup in 2010 (the 2008 Australian Open), but there is no doubt that his Davis Cup triumph with his country, coupled of course with the diagnosis of a gluten allergy, led to the decade of domination (or “Djomination”) that followed.

Now, nearly a decade and a half on, Sinner will hope that having finished the 2023 season as probably the most in-form player in the world, as proven by his defeating Djokovic twice in the Davis Cup semi-final (in both singles and doubles), he can carry all that momentum forward into 2024 and really challenge for Majors next season.

1. Olympic Tennis at Roland Garros

As with Wimbledon in 2012, so with Roland Garros in 2024–namely two doses of one of the four Majors in the same year. That is because Roland Garros will be hosting the tennis at the Paris Olympics next summer, giving the world’s greatest tennis players the chance to win on the world’s greatest clay court twice within a matter of months. In 2012, Andy Murray’s Olympic Gold Medal win at Wimbledon paved the way for his winning his first Major (at the US Open) just over a month later. Similarly, French tennis fans (and indeed the French Tennis Federation itself) will be hoping that a French player, male or female, can triumph on home clay at the Olympics and then carry that momentum forward into future Major events.

1. Hamad “The Hammer” Medjedovic Joining The ATP Tour

The ATP NextGen event has only been running since 2017, but it has already produced a succession of superstars: Stefanos Tsitsipas (who won in 2018); Jannik Sinner (the 2019 champion); and Carlos Alcaraz (who won in 2021). Well, the fourth fantastic Next Gen champion could be the 2023 winner, Hamad “The Hammer” Medjedovic. The Serb–indeed, “The Serb With The Serve,” as he is also known–triumphed in Jeddah, beating the No.1 seed, France’s Arthur Fils, in a fantastic five-set final, the first in the competition’s history (albeit that at the Next Gen Finals sets are abbreviated to a maximum of six games).

Medjedovic has huge shoes to fill in the form of Novak Djokovic, who of course is not just the greatest Serbian tennis player of all time but the greatest male player of all time (at least statistically). Nevertheless, with a serve that already looks like it could become the best (i.e. fastest) ever seen on the men’s tour, Medjedovic has an outstanding chance of following Djokovic and becoming Serbia’s second male Major-winner.

1. The Continuing Rise of China’s Zheng Qinwen

Zheng Qinwen is already China’s best female player since Li Na, the double Major-winner from a decade or so ago, but she has every chance of emulating Li Na’s two Major triumphs, if not exceeding them. Having been voted the WTA Newcomer of the Year in 2022, she built on that promise by having a superb 2023 season. It began with her beating Annett Kontaveit in the first round of the Adelaide International, in what may have been one of the first matches of the 2023 WTA season but was also one of the finest all year, and ended with her reaching a career high of World No.15. Obviously, the final steps–first breaking into the Top 10 and then winning a Major–are the hardest, but with her superb court movement and crushing forehand, Zheng Quinwen has every chance of taking them.

1. Boris Becker Back On Tour

Having had such a spectacular rise (winning Wimbledon at the age of 17), then an equally spectacular fall (being jailed in Britain in 2022 for non-disclosure of assets after being declared bankrupt), Boris Becker now faces the third act of his already storied career–rising again as a coach, this time to one of the most promising young male players on the circuit, Denmark’s Holger Rune. Of course Becker is already a Major-winning coach, having assisted Marián Vajda, Novak Djokovic’s coach, between 2013 and 2016. But this time he will be the main man, the undisputed head coach, and it will be fascinating to see if he can turn the hugely gifted Rune into a Major-winner. If he succeeds in doing so, then his redemption arc will be complete and the Hollywood biopic (or at least German TV series) celebrating his remarkable life will surely go into production immediately.

1. Arthur Fils and Luca Van Aasche Emerging as the New Kings of French Tennis

For over a century now, or ever since Suzanne Lenglen and Les Musquetaires (Borotra, Brugnon, Cochet and Lacoste) emerged in the wake of WWI, France has been arguably the most tennis-crazy nation in the world, but it has had relatively few Major champions. Indeed, 2023 marked the 40^th anniversary of the last time that a French man won the French Open, Yannick Noah having won at Roland Garros in 1983. Now, on the men’s side, France has not one but two great hopes: Arthur Fils, who has already won his first ATP title (in Lyon, just before the 2023 French Open); and his great friend, Luca Van Assche, who actually beat Fils in the 2022 French Open Boys’ Final. In 2024, Fils, Van Assche and all their countrymen and women will have two chances to triumph at Roland Garros – in the French Open itself and then at the Paris Olympics. And while it remains a long shot that either of them will win at Roland Garros in 2024, the chances of them doing so over the next decade are considerably higher.

1. Andy Murray’s Farewell Tour?

And finally, something not so much to look forward to as to fear, or at least accept, which is the possibility that 2024 could be not just Rafael Nadal’s last season but Andy Murray’s. The Great Scot has not said so, but given the stasis that his tennis seems to have achieved over the last few years, it must be at least a possibility.

Murray’s career, of course, can be almost exactly divided into two halves: the first and spectacular half, culminating in his second Wimbledon win in 2016, which was closely followed by his second Olympic Singles Gold in succession; and then the second and infinitely more difficult second half, in which he has struggled with a succession of injuries that almost saw him retire five years ago and may yet see him retire next year. Whatever happens, as with Nadal, it is to be hoped that Murray at least enjoys the grand farewell to tennis that he deserves, ideally including at least one deep run to the second week of a Major.