‘Novak didn’t really like that’: How Aussie Alexei Popyrin became the giant-slayer

Alexei Popyrin tends to shut out the world as big moments approach. Warming up, he likes to listen to music. If he’s playing a higher-ranked opponent, however, the headphones stay on as he enters the court to mask any difference between his reception and the other guy’s.

That sound presumably marks the gap between Popyrin’s place in the tennis world at any moment and the one he aspires to. It’s a gap that’s narrowed dramatically in recent months. But when he emerged to play then world No. 2 Novak Djokovic at the US Open on the last day of August last year, the headphones remained firmly – almost defensively – in place.

It meant the Australian missed the buzz as he walked onto Arthur Ashe Stadium for the biggest game of his life; only realised as he hit his groove that the crowd, packed into the biggest arena in US tennis, was solidly – often wildly – on his side. “The underdog always gets the crowd support and that’s what I was playing to,” says Popyrin, who entered August ranked 62 in the world. “I knew Novak didn’t really like that, so I was really pumping up the crowd and using their energy at the right times.” One of that US Open’s more eye-catching moments, the ensuing four-set defeat denied the defending champion his 25th grand slam, making 2024 Djokovic’s first season in seven years without a major title and pushing him to No. 7. It also signalled Popyrin’s emergence as a dangerous disruptor.

But if it looked like a bolt out of the blue, it wasn’t: Popyrin knew going in that he could do it after losses to Djokovic earlier this year. “I had my chances but was never able to capitalise on them,” he says of the Australian Open in January and Wimbledon in July, when he forced Djokovic to a fourth-set tiebreaker. “I knew I would have to take my chances if I had them in that US Open match, and that’s what I did.”

The real upset – and immediate source of his giant‑slaying confidence – had come a fortnight earlier and 600 kilometres to the north at the Canadian Open, in Montreal. In a five-day purple patch, Popyrin took out his first ATP Masters title, collecting six top 25 players – three of them top 10 – to become the first Australian to win a Masters title since Lleyton Hewitt 21 years ago. Popyrin still sounds slightly incredulous as he reflects how the stars aligned. “It was one of the toughest weeks I’ve had physically, I’ve never played that many matches in such a short time,” he says. “For me to get through against such high-quality opponents – just mentally, and for my body to feel the way it did – was amazing.”

Rain delays early in the tournament also meant he no sooner finished a three-hour, three-set quarter-final against Hubert Hurkacz on August 12 than he fronted Sebastian Korda in the semi three hours later, followed by world No. 6 Andrey Rublev in the final the following day. “To play the biggest match of my career – and the final of a Masters – the next night and to win again was unforgettable. The week went by in a blur. I tried to get to sleep, and then the next morning I was on a flight to my next tournament and played the next day.”

Not, however, before he had collected the biggest cheque of his career, $1.6 million, and sliced his ATP ranking from 62 to 23 – to widespread disbelief. US commentator Ben Rothenberg called it the most unexpected Masters 1000 win ever, while unranked Indian player Vansh Janghu took inspiration to “never, ever give up because your resilience can always be rewarded in any given week if you put yourself in the right positions. Alexei Popyrin was absolutely insanely clutch all week,” he tweeted. “Next level!”

In fact that upset, too, hid a backstory. Popyrin had been waiting for such an opportunity for years. And he’d left being neither “clutch” [excelling under pressure] nor “in the right position” to chance. “He’s unusual in the extent to which he’s invested in himself,” Tennis Australia’s head of player management, Fraser Wright, says of Popyrin. “He may be top 25 now, but when he was ranked 80 and not earning as much, he was still investing and coaches were still the same price. He’s got a physio who travels with him pretty much every week, and we’ve recently brought a fitness trainer on the road half the year that he’s investing more time with and you’re seeing a big difference now, he’s a lot more physical.”

Team Popyrin also has the women’s French rugby team’s nutritionist “on speed dial,” says UK-based Wright. “He’ll screenshot menus and she’ll tell him what to eat and drink when working back from when he’s playing. I mean, some of the stuff he has to do … if he has a match at 11 in the morning, he’s having boiled rice, broiled chicken as we’re tucking into bacon and eggs. What we think of as breakfast, lunch and dinner is just fuel to him.”

The upshot of that focus has been a closing of the gap in his game that is now reflected in the closing gap in his ranking. “He has a great serve and a great forehand, which are weapons for him, but there have been times when his defensive game hasn’t matched his offensive game and they’ve come closer together,” says Todd Woodbridge, who credits much of the change to the addition of veteran Belgian coach Xavier Malisse to Popyrin’s team in 2022.
“They have taken time to work on his game style, how to move forward, how to play what ball off what part of the court and not be as random as he was before. He’s now starting to really develop into a player who is dangerous, which is giving him this opportunity to beat some big names,” says Woodbridge, who heads AO’s Match Operations. “When he’s on, you don’t really want to have to come up against him.”

It’s Malisse, a former Wimbledon semi-finalist, and the subsequent addition of South African Neville Godwin to his coaching staff, that Popyrin credits with flipping not only his game but also his mentality after an extended 2022 slump that tanked his ranking into the 130s. “I was unlucky in 2022 because I was very young, inexperienced in the moment and I didn’t have a strong team behind me,” he says. “What I wanted after that 2022 season was an experienced player – somebody who had been there, done that – and that’s what I got in Xavier. He’s the one who made me realise how much work I had to do to get to where I wanted to, and how much work I had left to do. Not only on the court, but physically.

“I think that’s when I officially became an adult,” he says of 2022. “Off the court, I became more mature because I had to deal with those losses, and on the court, I had to put on a brave face and look like everything was all right when it was kind of eating at me … what I’ve done really well in the last two years is understand my emotions and understand when and how to use them … I’ve stopped spiralling and thinking about the worst possible outcome after tough matches, tough stretches of a couple of tournaments.

“You see juniors coming out and they tend to pump up the crowd or do the ear gesture very early on in the match,” he says. “I feel like that’s them just playing with their emotions and not knowing how to control those emotions … it’s really too early in a match. Back in the day, when I was younger, I used to do that, but it took a lot of energy out; you have to conserve your energy and use those moments at the right times.”

Having come so far, there’s now too much at stake to risk overcooking a moment, let alone spiralling. Particularly given the generational flux now under way as a new cohort jostles for primacy after the departure of Federer and Nadal, and even Djokovic’s Popyrin-assisted wobbles at 37. “He’s coming into his prime at just the right moment,” Woodbridge says of the Australian. “We’ve got two players that have stood out and look like they could dominate in Alcaraz and Sinner, but there is still this window of opportunity, and it doesn’t come around that often. If you can be ready, in your prime, and get two or three years, you might sneak a major. And that’s the window of opportunity that is starting to arise for players of the age and ilk of de Minaur and Popyrin.”

The point is not lost on the man himself, who turned 25 three days before the Canadian Open began. “Thinking about how quick the last seven or eight years have gone, the next five to seven years are probably when I need to peak, play my best tennis and get my best results,” Popyrin says. “With all the experiences I’ve had and the work I’m putting in, [these] are definitely the most important years of my life.”

That Woodbridge prefaces Popyrin’s name with de Minaur’s seems inevitable. Six months his senior, the latter is Australia’s No. 1 to Popyrin’s No. 2. Both born in Sydney, they grew up as neighbours in Alicante, Spain, where Popyrin’s parents moved after he was beaten at nine in his first international tournament by a kid who trained there. “He’s come along the entire journey with Alex de Minaur,” says Woodbridge. “And what has rubbed off on him from Alex is the ­ability to understand how hard you need to work and the discipline and dedication to the job at hand. The difficulty he’s faced is that he has a completely different game style to Alex’s.”

Popyrin has taken time to settle into his tall, gangly frame (1.96 metres to de Minaur’s 1.83 metres). “He’s had to be far more patient and understand that because of his game style, because of his body shape, it’s going to take him longer to get where he is getting to and have the year that he’s now had,” adds Woodbridge. “He’s had to really improve his strength and, most importantly, he’s had to improve his movement and understanding of how to play his game better.”

The same could be said of his story, always an important ingredient of player success in the entertainment business that is tennis. Part of his comparative obscurity – highlighted by the reaction to his Montreal win – is that Popyrin’s wins, including the Singapore and Croatian Opens in 2021 and 2023 respectively, have all come outside the slams that command the limelight and column inches. So have de Minaur’s, who also spent formative years off the Australian tennis stage. But it’s fair to say the Australian No. 1 has crystallised in the popular mind more easily. His run came earlier and has gone further, landing him inside the top 10. Then there’s that Hewittesque scrappiness and speed, the Demon nickname and logo scrawled across every camera lens after every win.

Nor is Popyrin’s Russian émigré origin tale as immediately familiar as the suburban Greek-boy backstories of those favoured Australian sons, Nick Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis. As Popyrin is only too aware. “I’m kind of in the middle of Demon and Kygs and Kok,” he says. “I haven’t had the results that Demon has had, but at the same time I don’t live in Australia with Kygs and Kok.” In fact, the story of his home-and-away formative years shares some of the awkwardness and angularity of his early game. The second eldest of four children of Russian immigrants, he credits his mother Elena with first pushing him into a wide array of sports – soccer remains his first love, to watch and play, but he’s also a keen golfer – and says she was with him on court almost every day until he was about 21.

He took up tennis at four, training at the Kim Warwick Tennis Academy in Hornsby, where “he was different to many in that he listened all the time, and he learnt quicker than most kids,” Warwick told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in September. At Newington College in Sydney’s inner west, he was “just a normal Australian boy”, he says, until his entrepreneur dad Alex – a former investment banker and internet executive who founded Sold Smart, an early Australian equivalent of Amazon – and moved the family to Dubai for business when he was eight.

“In Dubai, I was playing tennis and soccer,” he recalls. “My school soccer coach was [former UK Premier League player] Carlton Palmer, who tried to convince my parents to make me play football. He had a daughter playing tennis at university in England, so he knew a bit about tennis. My mum told him to come and watch me play tennis, so he watched and he was like, ‘Yeah, keep him in tennis.’ ”

From Dubai, his parents decided to invest in their tribe’s potential, particularly Alexei and his younger brother Anthony, who showed similar promise before suffering a foot injury at 14. Popyrin remembers the endless summers spent touring as a kid. “My family would rent a car and we’d just drive around Europe playing tennis tournaments, me and my brother, my younger sister, my grandma and my parents. I remember we had three CDs – Garfield, Stitch and Stuart Little – that we’d just play and play in the car. We’d stay in rented apartments and play junior tournaments for months.”

What sounds like hard yakka was his element. Fluent in English, Spanish and Russian, he’s a quintessentially global citizen who returns to Dubai in the off-season but travels most of the year.

To do so, though, he relies on those enduring ties. He credits long-term girlfriend Amy Pederick, whom he first met as a kid growing up in Dubai, with keeping him sane on the road and – together with his family – getting him through trials like 2022. When we speak by Zoom in early October, he’s just back from dinner, six days into the Shanghai Masters, where the family has been with him. “My brother tried to surprise me today, but he put a story on his Instagram and I saw it,” he says, breaking into a rare smile. “He failed.”

‘That’s tennis for you … in one week, you could be ranked 90 in the world or 25 in the world.’

Alexei Popyrin

Like de Minaur, he also remains attached to the country of his birth where his older sister, 11 years his senior, still lives in Melbourne with her children. Interestingly, he dates the recent upswing in his form back to not Montreal, but the Olympics just over a week earlier, where he managed to claim the scalp of three-time grand slam champion Stan Wawrinka and keep the flag flying into the third round, the first Australian man to do so since Lleyton Hewitt at London 2012. Winning a place on the Australian team was a childhood dream and source of pride to this family. “I was able to not just do that but win a few matches against some high-quality opponents. So that obviously got me quite confident and feeling good.”

He had identified the Olympics as a potential rebound opportunity as early as July 8, speaking to Fox Sports after losing to Djokovic at Wimbledon. And he remains hyper aware how different things could have been had he not hit the ground running in Montreal. Soon after, he was bundled out in the first round of the Cincinnati Open by French veteran Gaël Monfils, perhaps unsurprisingly given his Montreal marathon. “If I had lost in the first round in Montreal and Cincinnati and the US Open, I would’ve been ranked outside the top 90,” he says. “And that’s very easy to do. It’s easy to play a seeded player or a tough player and lose first round, it’s only a few points here and there. But I’d won Montreal – and I went to my career high and rank top‑25. That’s tennis for you … in one week, you could be ranked 90 in the world or 25 in the world.”

Popyrin has finally crystallised in the tennis world’s mind, too, having grown into his body, game, story; become Alexei the giant-slayer, even the romantic. In late November, Popyrin shared, on Instagram, his bent-knee proposal to Pederick, the childhood sweetheart he met in maths class at eight. “Ayeeeeeeeeeeee big boy pop!!!! ” de Minaur commented. “Shiiiiii mans all grown up,” added Kokkinakis, three years his senior. By the end of the week, it was Popyrin the tender disrupter that starred in television ads for this month’s Australian Open.

He’s looking forward to the home slam, as part of what Kyrgios recently called “the strongest time in Australian tennis”, with 10 Aussie men inside the top 100 for the first time in 42 years. So strong, in fact, that Kyrgios last year announced he would return to tennis at the Brisbane International at age 29. “After the American summer, I’m even more excited for it,” Popyrin, a study in contrast to Australia’s slacker king, says of the AO. “I really want to try and perform the way I did in America in front of the home crowd.”

No one knows better than him what that will take. But for all the broiled chicken, emotional economy and sagely absorbed advice from more experienced heads, he’s maintaining a 25-year-old’s sense of proportion as he eyes an off-season that’s also a festive one. “My fitness coach is looking forward to pre-season and I’m not,” he admits. “We’ll probably start the first or second of December and go through to Boxing Day, when we fly to Brisbane. He’ll have about 23 days. I’m not letting him do that to me on Christmas Day.”

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