Have you heard of Gregor Dimitrov? You soon will
Sharapova’s boyfriend has got some game
Pa ris • The citadel of the Big Four might not be falling just yet.
But this season, with Novak Djokovic nursing a sore wrist and Rafael Nadal suffering a rare clay-court wobble, a few rope ladders have at least been flung up to the battlements.
Chief among the young contenders are a trio who represent tennis’s “Generation Y.” Grigor Dimitrov, Milos Raonic and Kei Nishikori were all born within 18 months of each other around the start of the 1990s, just as Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray came out of the same batch of gifted infants in the mid-1980s. In a few years’ time, the new boys could be creating a new set of rivalries to keep the sport in vogue.
Or, in Dimitrov’s case, in Vogue. Handsome and quotable, with a girlfriend, Maria Sharapova, who is one of the queens of the sport, he was named last week at No. 5 in Sports Pro’s list of the world’s most marketable athletes. None of his peers have as much potential to step out of the sports section and into the gossip columns. From the sponsors’ perspective, it is all to the good that Dimitrov’s silky onehanded backhand resembles that of Roger Federer — the player whose retirement the sport fears above all. Indeed his whole technique is so reminiscent of the great man that he has gone through most of his career nicknamed “Baby Fed.”
Yet Dimitrov — now age 23 — himself has grown increasingly sick of the comparison. The time has come to stop emulating and start trailblazing, he said. “I think there is one recipe for each one of us,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s matchable. I don’t think that because this thing works for that player, the same thing is going to work for me.
“When I started on the seniors’ tour, I just felt like every day I was look- ing at the big guys and trying something new. I looked up to them in the locker room, and watched how they were stretching, how were their warmups, what do they eat.
“I’ve tried the gluten-free diet, it didn’t work for me. I’ve tried going crazy in the gym. When I got to the final in Brisbane last year, I’d been doing squats and lifting weights three times before every match, and I felt so flat. I’ve done bikram yoga, but I’m very flexible anyway and I’m barely keeping kilos on my body.
“Then, at some point, this friggin’ comparison with Roger [Federer] came, because everyone was thinking that this is what I was trying to do. I was never intending or even being provocative towards that space — to look like him or be like him. But everything that I was doing was turning that way and everyone was putting more oil on the fire.
“I watched all his matches, I’m not going to lie. Young kids will have idols, and try to look like them and be like them, but there is a point when you say, ‘Screw that, I’m me.’ And when you find that, your whole idea and perception of life changes.”
It might seem ironic in the circumstances that Dimitrov’s life has now become a tale of two Rogers — not only Federer but also Rasheed, the motormouthed Australian coach whom he hired at the start of October. Only a week later, he won his first ATP title in Stockholm, and has since added tournaments in Acapulco and Bucharest.
This was a brave appointment, even though Rasheed has built up a strong reputation after working with Lleyton Hewitt and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. A fitness obsessive with a boxer’s physique, he has a reputation as a military-style hard case, and Dimitrov now finds himself drilling like a marine.
“Physically, he probably lost a couple of years for sure,” Rasheed said. “I watched him as a young player coming on the tour, and that would be one of the drawbacks in his profiling, it didn’t look like enough was going on in that space.
“You only have to look at where Andy [Murray] was if you take him back five or six years, he was similar. Look at Andy now and it’s a different frame, and that’s allowed him to have a lot of confidence on the court and sustain his output.
“With Grigor, we have only touched the physical side. I think he is a quarter of the way through where he will end up physically. In 18 months’ time he will be an interesting athlete, I think.”
Although Dimitrov was born in Bulgaria, the son of a tennis coach, he has hardly lived in his home country, moving to Patrick Mouratoglou’s academy in Paris as a young teenager before spending some time in Stockholm. Yet his Hollywood credentials have only been boosted by last year’s move to Los Angeles, Sharapova’s long-time base. Now he says he spends his leisure time like “a typical Cali.”
“I just take my cruiser and I go around. I’m a very creative person so I like to go on the beach: maybe I’m going to meditate, maybe I’m going to do some exercise, maybe I am going to go to the bars on the beach, no T-shirt just fool around.
“That’s the person I am and I love being like this, because that’s how I get my inspiration. And once I get that inspiration you see everything so clearly in front of you that you feel like you can’t make the wrong step.” That is fortunate, as no one wants to see him make a wrong step. In a sport with succession planning issues, much rides on the shoulders of tennis’s crown prince.