As Bjorn Borg observed stoically from the Royal Box, Carlos Alcaraz moved to within a match of emulating the great Swede. The 22-year-old, tennis’s hottest property, who is in the form of his life and is on a 24-match winning streak dating back to April, is chasing the “double double”: winning both Roland Garros and Wimbledon in successive years.
Borg did it three times, in fact, from 1978-1980, but it's something Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer all missed out on. Yet just three years since he burst onto the world scene in 2022, Alcaraz is on the cusp of a sensational feat. And despite flirting with a final-set decider in the semi-finals here against the world No 5 Taylor Fritz, it felt somewhat inevitable that Alcaraz would hit his superlative heights when it mattered most.
