Alcaraz publicly speaks out against shorter warm-ups

Carlos Alcaraz won the Next Gen ATP Finals and after the event, he spoke out publicly against shorter warm-ups enforced at the event.

The Next Gen ATP Finals have been used as a testing ground in the past and the 2021 edition was no exception. This year the warm-ups were shortened from the usual 4 minutes to only 1 minute in order to test how it would look like. Event winner Carlos Alcaraz spoke after the event and he is firmly against the idea of short warm-ups.

He said:

“The one minute of warm-up, you have no time to warm up. I would say for the player, you can’t warm up everything, every shot, the volley, the serve, the backhand, the forehand, at all. I would say that you have to warm up four minutes to play forehands, backhands, volley, serve, smash, everything to start the match in the best way possible.’

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Alcaraz was not firmly against all rules imposed at the event admitting:

“There are some rules that I would keep and there are some other rules that I don’t really like.”

He would not specify which ones he would keep but he would not like to see shortened warm-ups. Speaking on the event win he said the win would not have been possible without some earlier results in the year:

“I think this experience wouldn’t be possible without the experience that I got in other tournaments like Madrid, playing against Rafa, in Acapulco playing against Zverev. There are a lot of tournaments, matches that I played that gave me a lot of experience to be able to get more mature so soon.’