Carlos Alcaraz will play at the first Olympic Games later this year, and he would love to win it, and he compared that to winning Wimbledon.
The Spaniard will be one of the favorites to win the Olympic gold, especially after winning the title at Roland Garros. The Games are played on the same courts and on the same surface, so by proving to be the best in a best-of-five format in the French capital, Alcaraz is widely expected to do really well once more.
He would certainly love to go all the way and win a medal for Spain, even more so than winning Wimbledon, which will be played a few weeks before that. The 21-year-old already has a Wimbledon trophy after beating Novak Djokovic in the final last year.
For him, though, the Olympic Games mean a lot on a personal level. He enjoyed singing the Spanish anthem after winning Roland Garros, and just experiencing that again, but with a gold medal around his neck, would mean a lot to him.
After all, he’s not just Alcaraz when he plays at the Olympics. He’s Carlos Alcaraz of Spain there, and it means a lot to him to represent his country on the grandest of stages.
“Now, I would prefer to win the Olympics over Wimbledon. You don’t play for yourself; you play for your country.”
Part of the equation for him is also what happened at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when Rafael Nadal defeated Fernando Gonzalez in the final to win gold for Spain.
He was a kid watching that and obviously wanted to emulate his idol in doing the same. It’s certainly lined up nicely for him. He looks formidable on the clay in Paris, but the best-of-three format may prove a challenge, as he would have lost his last two matches in Paris in that format this year, being down 1-2 to both Jannik Sinner and Alexander Zverev before turning around those matches.