The really good players on the ATP Tour start off well at a young age. But which player in history was the youngest when he finished the season in the top 20 of the world rankings at the end of the year?
Nowadays the young players on the tour are included in the category NextGen-Stars. In former times under Björn Borg, Boris Becker and Co. they were also called tennis wonder children. But which players are the real prodigies of the tennis scene?
For this the current youngsters have to line up at the back and also the player generation around Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are missing in this list. As is well known, Federer was able to celebrate his breakthrough relatively “late”, opponent Nadal was here earlier and secured the title at the French Open at the age of 18.
Nevertheless, it is another generation of players who were able to play their way into the top 20 of the world rankings in their early teens. Unchallenged, Björn Borg is the first player in the Open Era to take first place in these statistics. At the age of 17 years and 6 months, the Swede managed to finish the year 1973 in the top 20 of the world ranking list and was thus the first U18 actor to succeed in this feat.
Borg then celebrated a great career, which the silent contemporary ended unexpectedly early at the age of 26. Several Grand Slam titles should nevertheless be able to call the blonde with the hair band his own.
What is particularly striking in the statistics of the latest year-end top 20 is that eight players from the 1980s are in the top 10 behind Borg. A golden generation of tennis players crystallized with names like Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Andre Agassi or the German Boris Becker.
The youngest of all Akateure, which stood in the Top 20 at the end of the year is the US-American Aaron Krickstein. In 1984, at the age of 17 and four months, Krickstein finished the season in twelfth place in the rankings.