Since the aughts, China has steadily fed girls’s tennis with sturdy gamers—together with a Hall of Famer in Li Na—however by comparability, it has been sluggish to crack the boys’s recreation. Now 26-year-old Zhizhen Zhang is dashing that course of alongside. Last October, Zhang grew to become the primary Chinese participant to enter the highest 100 within the males’s rankings, on the energy of a blistering summer time on the Challenger circuit. He said on the time his goal was to enter the highest 50. An admirable aim, however arguably extra modest than his accomplishment this week on clay on the Madrid Open: changing into the primary Chinese participant to make the quarterfinal of a Masters, that are only one notch beneath the majors. More to the purpose, Zhang bought there by upsetting three seeded gamers in three-setters, incrementally advancing his private bests: Denis Shapovalov (his first win over a top-30 participant), Cam Norrie (his first top-20 win), and Taylor Fritz (his first top-10 win). Even if Zhang had been to lose his subsequent match this may be, by a long way, essentially the most spectacular match efficiency from a Chinese man.
Zhang is 6-foot-4 with an incredible serve, which partially explains why he is performed seven(!) tiebreaks on this Madrid run and received six. With no disrespect to Norrie, and gentle disrespect to Shapovalov, these wins had been nice however not altogether inconceivable. The actual eyebrow-raiser was Zhang’s 3-6, 7-6(5), 7-6(8) victory over Fritz, who has typically been sturdy. It was a conflict of colossal high-level forehands, as Zhang pushed his in the direction of the 100-mph mark with regularity—the most important hitting of the clay season up to now, and a loud reminder that gamers up-and-down the highest 100 can maintain top-five strokes do you have to catch them on the suitable day.
Mentally, the match was torturous for each gamers. Zhang went down a set and a break, returning serve at 4-3, 40-0 within the second, earlier than clawing again to a second-set tiebreak; there he fell into an 0-3 gap earlier than successful it. Serving for the match at 6-5 within the third set, Zhang was damaged, sending the gamers to a decisive tiebreak. There he fended off three Fritz match factors. He misplaced his first match level, courtesy of a hair-raising, go-for-broke forehand cross from Fritz, however cashed out on his second match level. Asked how he saved his cool, Zhang had jokes: “After so many losses, you are feeling calm.”
With this win, Zhang leapt up 33 spots in the live rankings, reaching No. 66, closing in on his stated goal of entering the top 50. For now, countryman Yibing Wu sits ahead of him—he got a breakout Dallas Open title in February, coincidentally beating both Shapovalov and Fritz en route—but another win would put Zhang ahead. Next up is an unusually winnable quarterfinal against Aslan Karatsev, who went oddly nuclear in 2021 (even making an Australian Open semifinal) before fading out of the top 100 this season. In his post-match interview, the man nicknamed ZZZ let us in on a behind-the-scenes detail: “I’ll tell you a secret. We had a practice, I lost 6-0 with Karatsev.” May this reminiscence preserve him simply as cool as he is been in these three clutch wins.
