Italian translation at settesei.it
Last week’s ATP 250s had their share of surprises, with all three top seeds falling in their first matches. But the biggest shock of all was reserved for Sunday, when 25-year-old Argentine Juan Ignacio Londero capped an unexpected breakthrough week in Cordoba with a title. The hometown wild card pummelled Federico Delbonis and then came from behind to defeat Guido Pella a three-set final. Londero was playing just his fourth tour-level event, and his first tour-level win came on Tuesday, a first-round upset of fifth-seed Nicolas Jarry.
There aren’t many players who’ve managed to win a title the same week as their first match win on tour. Going back to 1990, I found only five others who matched Londero’s feat:
Player Age Year Event Nicolas Lapentti 19.1 1995 Bogota Lleyton Hewitt 16.9 1998 Adelaide Juan Ignacio Chela 20.5 2000 Mexico City Santiago Ventura 24.4 2004 Casablanca Steve Darcis 23.3 2007 Amersfoort Juan Ignacio Londero 25.5 2019 Cordoba
It’s a diverse group. Lleyton Hewitt announced his presence with a title as he embarked on a Hall of Fame career, Nicolas Lapentti had great things ahead of him as well, and Juan Ignacio Chela would go on to win six more titles. (Next time a player named Juan Ignacio wins his first ATP match, watch out!) The other two players broke through at older ages and provide better clues as to what we should expect from Londero. Steve Darcis won one more title within a year of his first, and stuck around long enough to crack the top 40 at age 33. Santiago Ventura never played another final, and his career peak ranking was 65, just four spots above Londero’s new level.
A perfect 25
Still, pointing out that Londero is unlikely to develop into a top ten player doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate his accomplishment. I found over 1,000 players who won their first tour-level match since 1990, and only 24% of them managed to win their second match at the same tournament, let alone the title. The average first-time winner claimed a mere 1.3 matches, including their debut win. In addition to the six titlists, only nine reached the final and 43 made it to the semis after recording their first win.
The results for debut winners are even more bleak when we narrow our focus to players in Londero’s age group. Despite the increasing age of the men’s tennis population, if a player hasn’t made an impact on tour before age 25, he is unlikely to do so. 17% of our first-time winners were 25 or older, and Londero is the only one of them to reach the final in his breakthrough event. These 185 players combined for only 53 wins after their first-round milestones, and four of those wins were recorded by Londero last week.
Pessimistic as this sounds, there are a few encouraging precedents for the Argentine to follow. Paolo Lorenzi won his first tour-level match about one month younger than Londero’s current age. It took Lorenzi nearly another decade to hoist his first ATP trophy, and he’s still hovering just ouside the top 100 at age 37. Tennys Sandgren (who, coincidentally, lost to Lorenzi in New York last night), didn’t win a tour-level match until he was 26. Six months later he was in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open. The most extreme late bloomer is Victor Estrella, who was almost 33 years old at the time of his first ATP match win, which he followed with a tour-level title 18 months later.
Of course, Lorenzi is one of a kind, and the unexpected feats achieved by Sandgren and Estrella have minimal predictive value. Beyond the thrill of winning his hometown tournament, the most important implication of the title for Londero is that it launches his ranking into the top 70. He gets a place in the Roland Garros main draw, and in the next twelve months, he’ll have a number of other opportunities to play tour-level events. He deserves it: My Elo rankings suggest he is not only a top-70 player overall, but he is just outside the top 40 on clay courts. Londero’s title truly came out of nowhere, but there’s no reason to be suprised the next time he posts an excellent result on clay.