Dominic Thiem has trained a one-handed backhand at the suggestion of his coach Günter Bresnik at a young age. Today, his showpiece is a model for the youngsters Denis Shapovalov and Stefanos Tsitsipas, who, according to Thiem, do not really come close to his level.
Behind Roger Federer and Grigor Dimitrov, Thiem is currently the third best player with a one-handed backhand. Stan Wawrinka is also known for his whipping backhand baseballs, while Thiel’s opening opponent in Indian Wells, the Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas (today at 8:00 p. m. in our live ticker) and Shapovalov also play with this variation.
Is there possibly a fundamental revival of the one-handed backhand coming up?”Not really,”Thiem believes:”Of course, some young players have them in their repertoire, but I don’t think we will see them as often as we have seen them before”.
The Canadian Shapovalov recently announced that he had copied his backhand from Thiem’s.”We are good friends and it is nice to hear,”says the 24-year-old, adding with a wink:”But it looks quite different with him. I’d say he did a really bad job of imitating me.”
The decisive factor for Thiems Technik was his coach Bresnik, who advised the sixth in the world rankings to have a one-handed backhand in his childhood. Thiem himself hardly questioned the measure himself:”I didn’t think much about it at the time, not even about my backhand.”
While some stars often change their coaching staff, Bresnik is always on the side of Thiems from the beginning,”This may be a little unusual, but I still feel like I’m improving with him in every training session,” said Thiem,”so there’s no better trainer for me than him.
Thiem won against Tsitsipas in Doha at the beginning of the year, but before this match the Greek was a big unknown to the Austrian number one – even training together was not enough before the tournament in the desert state. Dominic Thiem is very happy that with Stefanos Tsitsipas a player from Greece is finally getting ready to conquer the tennis world. Dominic Thiem thinks it’s quite conceivable that Tsitsipas unetr will be the best 20 players in the world.
Here is the men’s single panel in Indian Wells