Tennis: injuries, withdrawals… Carlos Alcaraz, what’s the problem?
Carlos Alcaraz pushes his rock. Absent in Monte-Carlo and Barcelona due to an arm injury, the Spaniard made a fleeting return to Madrid (eliminated in the quarter-finals). He thought he had finally tamed the mountain of injuries. But fate attacks Alcaraz like the gods on Sisyphus, pushing him to withdraw on Friday, due to a “muscle edema” on the same arm, for the Masters 1000 in Rome, last rehearsal before Roland-Garros. His preparation for the Parisian Grand Slam is far from ideal and the series of injuries he has suffered over the past year and a half raises questions, even though he will only celebrate his 21st birthday on Sunday May 5.
Since the fall of 2022, Carlos Alcaraz has suffered nine different injuries, forcing him to abandon or forfeit eleven tournaments. “What is most surprising is that he gets injured in different places each time”remarks Paul-Henri Mathieu, captain of the French Davis Cup team, who warned after his career about the risks of overtraining among young people, in the columns of the Parisian.
The double Grand Slam winner (US Open 2022 and Wimbledon 2023) is no longer coping, between muscle discomfort (April and October 2023), hamstring tears (February 2023) and abdominal tears (October 2022), post-arthritis -traumatic hand injury (April 2023) and ankle sprain then arm injury in 2024.
Guillaume Levavasseur, sports doctor and member of the Roland-Garros medical team, distinguishes between injuries “linked to overuse, overload of work in the area concerned”like most muscle and tendon injuries, and those related to “a traumatic accident”like sprains.
Concerned by these two categories of causes, Carlos Alcaraz admits a certain helplessness, in an interview with the Spanish sports daily Marca : “Often I don’t understand situations and I [à son staff] ask why injuries happen even though I’m doing things right: I sleep well, I eat well, I train well.”
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