Félix Auger-Aliassime Is Taking Tennis by Storm
Félix Auger-Aliassime’s Wimbledon warm-up earlier this year laid bare his extraordinary promise. At the Queen’s Club Championships, he beat Stefanos Tsitsipas, Grigor Dimitrov, and Nick Kyrgios—three players routinely mentioned as Next Big Things—without so much as dropping his serve. Though he just turned 19, he seems to have a poise and maturity beyond his years—something that, as much as his sensational tennis skills, has people talking about this Montreal native, currently ranked 23rd in the world, as a serious threat to the longtime rule of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic.
Auger-Aliassime began playing tennis at the age of four at the suggestion of his father, Sam, a tennis coach, originally from Togo. (His mother, Marie, is a teacher, and his older sister Malika plays college tennis.) “He just transmitted his passion to us,” Auger-Aliassime says, grinning broadly, revealing the gap in his front teeth. “I don’t really have a memory of not playing. And at a very young age, I told him, ‘I want to be a professional tennis player.’ What I like most about the game is its competitive side. It’s a duel—like chess or like gladiators. It’s two players confronting each other and finding solutions, and I really like that.”
In both his love for the sport and his determination to excel at it, Auger-Aliassime’s hero, inevitably, is Federer—who invited the young player to join him at a training camp in Dubai in 2017. “As a kid, you see Federer with such distance, he’s almost like a divinity,” he says. “But for me to talk to him and play with him—it reduced this distance a little bit.”
Perhaps that distance will soon be reduced in other ways, too, as Auger-Aliassime continues to climb the tennis ladder. For now, though, he is simply working hard. “Obviously the winning part is great, but that’s not everything,” he says. “The best thing for me is the sound of a ball that has been hit well.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
