Wasted Youth

In a previous post I mentioned I wanted to write about the career progress of a couple of previously highly talked about juniors, Bernard Tomic and Grigor Dimitrov, I was also going to through Ricardas Berankis in too as liek the other two he is also a previous junior US Open winner (and unlike Tomic was a junior number 1). The inspiration for the post came from Tomic’s Davis Cup captain and former world number 1 (for 1 week) Pat Rafter who publicly lambasted Tomic for his “disgraceful” performance. Rafter was right, as I suspect was John McEnroe who accused him of tanking. A part of me hopes he was genuinely just woeful on the day because if you can’t muster up the enthusiasm to win at a Slam then what will you care about? The idea was then backed up after watching Dimitrov playing Tsung-Hua Yang in Bangkok and seeing that despite being 21 he still occasionally struggles to know what shot to play. One point in particular at 1 set all and 0-30 down exemplified this when Yang hit a cross court backhand to Dimitrov and after initially running around it for the inside-out forehand at the very last second he changed his mind, stumbled with his footwork and hit a tame backhand. As it turned out he won the point and the match even winning a point whilst lying down at one point.

Anyway, that was the post I was initially going to write and probably still will at some point but for now I’d like to briefly showcase the lack of any decent juniors breaking through on tour recently. The aforementioned Tomic is the only teenager in the top 100 and by the end of the month he will be 20. Incidentally there is only one 20 year old too and that is Ryan Harrison at 54. For a while now I’ve been thinking/noticing that there is a lack of youth making its way up the rankings so I decided to look at the ages of the top 50 players at end of each year since 2002. I usually use the end of the year for looking at rankings as it is a constant date but really it is a little arbitrary. Below is a graph that shows the average age in years for each season for the top 10, 20 and 50. For 2012 I’ve taken the current rankings (not race).

As you can see up until 2008, on New Year ’s Eve, the average age of the top 50 player hovered around 25 years 6 month. Since 2008 though this number has gradually crept upwards to the point where this year if the rankings were to stay the same, the average age of the top 50 will be 27 years and 6 months. The top 50 should in theory always have a mix of youngsters making their way up the ladder, the “better than average journeymen”, the older “decent” players and maybe a few old greats on their way down. What has happened over the last few years though is that in the absence of decent youngsters pushing the herd of mid 20-somethings, the herd has slowly grown older. The graph shows this quite clearly. In 2008 the average age of the top 10 was 24 years 6 months, in 2012 it will be 27 years 8 months. The table below shows the respective rankings of the current top 20 since 2008. In 2011 6 players retained their top 10 status and this year 8 out of 10 have with last year’s number 10 Nicolas Almagro being replaced by last year’s number 11, Juan Martin Del Potro. It would be easy to argue that 9 players would be keeping their place had Mardy Fish not missed the entire European clay court season. Similarly 15 of the top 20 have also retained their place.

Rankings in red are outside top 50,

rankings in green signify injury hit seasons

Anyway, these are the “facts”, as the race currently stands Almagro is sitting at number 10 and that would make 9 players retaining top 10 status. Once the season is over I hope to write a follow up piece including my thoughts as to why this has actually happened and why I think, despite the lack of youth in the current top 50, it will soon be 21/22 year olds rocketing up the rankings like Nadal in 2005 rather than 26 year olds like in the case of Tipsarevic. I’ll also try and amalgamate the reasons why the opportunity has passed Dimtrov by and will probably pass by Tomic too.

Edit: I need to get better at organising my thoughts. Completely missed that I think there is more behind the trend than simply players getting fitter allowing them to compete at the highest level for longer. Same goes for the younger players not being physically strong enough. Also, for those interested below is a box and whiskers plot of the dataset used in the original chart.

For any who are interested, my first experience at the races wasn't as awful as I had imagined despite losing money on every race. However I won't be going back in a hurry, despite paying £20 to get in and stand on the finish line I barely got to see any of the action and the wait inbetween races was far too long.