Italian translation at settesei.it
With a tennis calendar tilted heavily toward hard court events, we don’t see many true clay court specialists these days. The best male players who excel on clay are forced to adapt their games to hard courts, as well: Rafael Nadal has won six majors off of clay, while Pablo Carreno Busta and Diego Schwartzman have both hoisted trophies at tour level hard court events. It’s possible to play a mostly-clay schedule at the Challenger level, but it’s nearly impossible to establish yourself as an ATP regular without winning some matches on hard courts.
Dominic Thiem is capable enough on fast surfaces, but more than any other tour player, he is considerably better on the dirt than off it. In the last 52 weeks, he has won 25 of 31 matches on clay, compared to only 24 of 42 on other surfaces. Against the top ten, he is a respectable 7-9 on clay (more impressive when you consider that 12 of the 16 matches were against the Big Four, seven of them facing Nadal, and two of the others came against Stan Wawrinka), but a dismal 2-15 on hard courts. If you, like me, had settled into thinking of Thiem as a solid but not particuarly threatening member of the top ten, you probably didn’t realize quite how bad he is on hard courts–or just how good he has become on clay.
When only clay court results are taken into consideration, Thiem rates as the second-best player on the surface. According to clay court Elo, the Austrian outranks everyone on tour except for Rafa and Novak Djokovic, whose rating reflects his skill level when he last regularly played and very likely will overstate his ability when he returns. Thiem trails Nadal by about 180 points, 2410 to 2235, implying that in a head-to-head matchup, we’d except the Austrian to win only 26% of the time. But when we compare Thiem to the rest of the pack and exclude the walking wounded–Djokovic, Wawrinka, Andy Murray, and Kei Nishikori–along with clay-skipper Roger Federer, his position looks much better. The next best clay courter, Alexander Zverev, trails Thiem by about the same margin, nearly 170 points.
A clay court Elo rating over 2200 is a useful marker of elite status. In the professional era, only 29 players have reached that level, 22 of whom can count at least one Grand Slam title to their names. Among active players, only the Big Four, Nishikori, Juan Martin del Potro, David Ferrer, and Thiem belong to the club.
Where Thiem really stands out is the juxtaposition of his clay court success and his hard court mediocrity. After his title last week in Buenos Aires, his Elo rating based only on clay court results was 2234, compared to a hard court rating of 1869. The first number, as we’ve seen, is good for third overall, second if we exclude Djokovic’s increasingly stale results; the second puts him 31st on tour, behind Schwartzman, Damir Dzumhur, and Fabio Fognini.
No one active today is more of a clay specialist–in the sense that his results on clay exceed his results on hard–than Thiem. (There are some even more extreme differences between grass and either hard or clay, but the brevity of the grass season means that many of those contrasts are due only to small samples.) The ratio of Thiem’s clay court Elo rating to his hard court rating–again, 2234 to 1869–is 1.20, far beyond any of the 44 other active players with a clay court Elo rating of 1800 or higher. Simone Bolelli comes in second, at 1.12, and a handful of players, including Nadal, register at 1.10. Here is the entire top 20:
Player Clay Elo Hard Elo Ratio Dominic Thiem 2234 1869 1.20 Simone Bolelli 1834 1634 1.12 Rafael Nadal 2410 2182 1.10 Albert Ramos 1873 1696 1.10 Federico Delbonis 1869 1696 1.10 Pablo Carreno Busta 1921 1746 1.10 Pablo Cuevas 1873 1709 1.10 Nicolas Almagro 1903 1755 1.08 Karen Khachanov 1838 1701 1.08 Leonardo Mayer 1878 1741 1.08 Aljaz Bedene 1826 1695 1.08 David Ferrer 2017 1894 1.07 Philipp Kohlschreiber 1951 1845 1.06 Stan Wawrinka 2138 2027 1.06 Martin Klizan 1800 1709 1.05 Guido Pella 1825 1744 1.05 Borna Coric 1830 1760 1.04 Fernando Verdasco 1863 1794 1.04 Alexander Zverev 2067 1997 1.04 Feliciano Lopez 1830 1772 1.03
A few decades ago, when it was possible for top players to spend more than two or three months per year racking up points on clay courts, such lopsided ratings were a bit more common. Of the 29 men who have ever topped 2200 in clay court Elo rating, 11 have at some point recorded a ratio of 1.20 or higher. That includes Nadal, whose clay rating was 20% higher than his hard court number early in 2008, and Sergi Bruguera, whose ratio topped out at 1.29. Four other major titlists–Bjorn Borg, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Thomas Muster, and Guillermo Vilas–also exceeded 1.20 at some point during their career. To put Thiem’s specialization in context, though, consider that Guillermo Coria maxed out at 1.19 and Gustavo Kuerten peaked at 1.16. Even Ferrer–the epitome of the clay court specialist to a generation of fans–never exceeded 1.15 once his clay court Elo rating had passed the 2000-point threshold.
The category into which Thiem fits most neatly–specialists who are decidedly middle-of-the-pack on hard courts–largely belongs to an earlier era. When we lower our clay court Elo standard to a career peak of 2000 points, a mark equal to about 15th on tour right now, we’re left with a group of 145 players in the professional era. Of those, 65 (45%) were at some point as lopsided as Thiem is now, with a clay-to-hard rating ratio of at least 1.20. Yet only five of those belong to active players (Nadal, Thiem, Fognini, Pablo Cuevas, and Nicolas Almagro) and two-thirds of them came before 1995.
In some cases, players with substantially better clay court results learn to compete at a higher level on faster surfaces. Thiem is 24, and Nadal had a similar specialist’s ratio at age 22. Other former greats enjoyed early success on clay and quickly figured out hard courts as well. The Austrian may prove to be a late bloomer in that regard. That’s unlikely, but when Nadal retires or (improbable as it seems) fades, Thiem is poised to rack up titles and emerge as the greatest clay court player of his generation, regardless of whether his hard court game improves.