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.’

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.’