Félix Auger-Aliassime saw tennis change before his eyes. He’s done getting lost in the shuffle

PARIS — At 25, Félix Auger-Aliassime is still on his way up. Just a few years removed from the typical men’s athletic peak of the late 20s, the Canadian is far from old.

However, he is not young anymore, especially in tennis terms. He’s being played through his teenage years as a possible next big thing. He has come within shouting distance of the top of the tennis mountain, fallen back down and then climbed back up again, all the way to a top four finish at this year’s French Open and a place in the top five in the world.

His first match, Tuesday night against Germany’s Daniel Altmaier, was a five-set saga. Auger-Aliassime took victory in a match-deciding tiebreak, winning 4-6, 6-4, 4-6, 6-1, 7-6(7) after four hours and 16 minutes, capturing the essence of a player desperate to become a mainstay at the top of the sport. Auger-Aliassime came back twice from a set down, and from a break of the last set. His mind had every opportunity to wander to end it all and look at the grass, a surface much more hospitable to his power play.

Instead, he stood his ground.

“I think this is the first time I ask myself: which player do I feel like?” Auger-Aliassime said at a press conference ahead of the tournament about his career No. 5 world ranking.

“I am who I am. I believe I am a good tennis player. Obviously Carlos is not here, so that is why I am the fourth seed and not fifth. I am currently fifth in the world and I have worked for my place there.”

It’s a nice neighborhood. Three of the four people in front of him are all-time greats: Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic. The fourth, Alexander Zverev, is perhaps the best active men’s player to never win a Grand Slam, and is a three-time major finalist. It’s quite an exalted place.

Many critically acclaimed players have held it in recent years before calling it quits. Some of them have been ranked fourth in the world, depending on their health or how much Djokovic played between Grand Slams.

Taylor Fritz. Jack Draper. Andrei Rublev. Lorenzo Musetti. Holger Rune. Ben Shelton. They are all top players. They have all hit a seemingly impenetrable ceiling, coupled with the dominance of the top three at the Grand Slams and Zverev’s consistency in reaching their final stages.

Auger-Aliassime, who suffered a knee injury in 2023 and 2024 while Alcaraz and then Sinner organized a takeover, is far from giving up.

“He never lost faith,” said Federic Fontag, the veteran coach who started working at Auger-Aliassime in 2017 and took on a full-time role in 2020.

Auger-Aliassime made his early rise playing the version of the sport he thought he needed to topple the likes of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic. Since his first descent, he has learned that to reach the top in tennis’s version of Sinner and Alcaraz requires something different.

For Auger-Aliassime, it was yet another big ask in a life full of them.

“From the age of 14 or 15, I had quite high expectations,” Auger-Aliassime said during a recent interview.

Seven years ago, when Auger-Aliassime played 20-year-old Stefanos Tsitsipas in the quarter-finals of Queen’s, the prestigious warm-up tournament for Wimbledon, former world number four Greg Rusedski predicted that Auger-Aliassime and Tsitsipas would meet in 15 Grand Slam finals during their careers.

That prophecy hasn’t aged well.

Yet Auger-Aliassime is blessed with the physical gifts to excel in virtually any sport. His coaches say he has long approached tennis with a level of seriousness and discipline far beyond his years. He’s had one of the biggest serves in the game for a long time, and when he gets the chance to hit it, he follows up with a huge forehand.

He will need all that and more to remain in his exalted position until the end of the season. The gap between Carlos Alcaraz at number 2 and Zverev at number 3 is over 6,000 ranking points. That’s three Grand Slam titles and change.

On Monday, Shelton moved 20 points ahead of Auger-Aliassime, bumping him to No. 6. Only 730 points separate Auger-Aliassime and Alexander Bublik at number 10. With the draw at Roland Garros becoming more open by the day, there will probably be a lot of shaking when the red clay lands on Court Philippe-Chatrier in ten days.

Fontag said the biggest threat to a player like Auger-Aliassime doesn’t come from his peers. It’s all the quality lower down the ladder.

“If on a day you are between 5 and 10 percent below your level, you can lose to number 60 or 70,” Fontag said

Auger-Aliassime hasn’t been in that zip code since 2019, but at the start of 2024 he was closer to world number 60 than world number 5. He came perilously close to entering that awkward existence of a player who is more famous and far better rewarded than his ranking suggests.

Carlos Alcaraz dismissed Félix Auger-Aliassime 6-2, 6-4 at the ATP Tour Finals last year. (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Auger-Aliassime, a Canadian of French and Togolese descent, is the rare player with a natural appeal on three continents. He has long had lucrative sponsorship deals with Adidas and Babolat, which are endemic to tennis. He recently renovated both. But Auger-Aliassime also has significant deals with major companies whose products are only tangentially related to sports, including Rodgers Communications, the Canadian telecom company, and BNP Paribas, the multinational financial institution.

These are much more difficult to obtain. Auger-Aliassime began working with the sport’s representative IMG ahead of the 2025 season. In March he became ambassador of Polestar, the Swedish electronic car manufacturer.

Auger-Aliassime said he’s “learned to separate things where, ‘Okay, the tennis I have to take care of, and then the deals and the attention and all the pressure that comes from the business side of things.’

The deal with Polestar followed three difficult years as he had to figure out how to deal with a tear in his left knee that left him limping around the field in 2023. He ended 2022 by qualifying for the ATP Tour Finals, the season-ending tournament for the season’s eight best players. By March 2024, he had fallen to number 36.

Auger-Aliassime never had surgery, but did receive stem cell injections to aid healing as he played mostly in pain for two seasons. At one point, when improvement was slower than everyone wanted, Fontag offered to step back or even leave.

“You need a relationship based on truth, reality and needs,” he said. He wanted Auger-Aliassime not to blame everything on the injury. “We have goals. If there is no result, where does it come from? If I can’t deliver it, we get expertise outside of mine.”

Auger-Aliassime’s game, which he built around that big serve and forehand, thrives indoors. That has forced him to play a lot in tournaments and at times of the year when other top players take breaks, because those events give him the best chance to win.

That became especially complicated over the past three seasons, when Auger-Aliassime faced a trifecta of obstacles. He had to simultaneously deal with his injury, the challenge of climbing back up the ladder while playing in tournaments against the top players much earlier than he was used to, and adapt his game to the changing demands that Alcaraz and Sinner have placed on the chasing pack.

He remembers learning the basics of point building and waiting for opportunities, as Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray all did in their prime.

“Amazing strengths, but they knew when to use them,” Auger-Aliassime said.

“Roger also used a disc to mix things up, especially on grass.

“All of this is being used now, but it’s such a higher speed and such a higher level of efficiency. And the defense hasn’t become just defense either. You’re playing against Carlos and Jannik and you come to the net and if you don’t approach really well, they can make a passing shot that you can’t really play on.”

“The speed is so much faster. You have to be so much more precise with that speed to put the opponent in a difficult position.”

As his knee improved, his serve and overall explosiveness returned to where it had been and even a few clicks better, but the progress was gradual.

A telling statistic of Auger-Aliassime is his record in the tiebreak, where good serving at a crucial moment becomes a difference maker. He plays it a lot because his serve is difficult to handle and his return game, especially on his backhand side, can be fragile.

In 2022, he went 60-27 and was 32-23 in tiebreakers. During the two injury-plagued seasons that followed, he went 52-44 and was 24-26 in tiebreakers. Last year he was 50-23 and 32-14 in tiebreaks. Adjusting that serve and trying to make it more accurate without losing speed, as he did when he was injured, has given him more confidence and, he thinks, created more uncertainty among his opponents.

“It gives guys the feeling that if you play against Félix it’s going to be a tough day because the best you can do is beat me in tiebreaks,” he said. “Playing like that against a majority of players and getting broken against just a few of the best players in the world makes me very dangerous and consistent.”

Throughout last season, Auger-Aliassime gradually climbed the ladder. Then the draw at the US Open produced a match against Zverev, the No. 3 seed, in the third round. Auger-Aliassime was number 27 in the world.

“It’s a key match because you win that big match and then you beat the third seed and suddenly I’m in a position where I can win the fourth round, I can win the quarter-finals,” he said. “These are competitions that are tough, but feasible.”

Auger-Aliassime finally played the way he wanted to play, playing to his strengths and being solid on the backhand, but also waiting for the right opportunity, being disciplined but also aggressive.

He defeated Zverev in four sets and turned the match into a tiebreak in the second set. He then defeated Andrey Rublev in straight sets and Alex de Minaur in four sets, winning two of them in tiebreaks. He made Jannik Sinner work in the semifinals, winning the second set before losing the next two.

Then indoor swing arrived in the fall with Auger-Aliassime in top form, serving in a windless environment and pounding balls through fast lanes. He won the European Open in Brussels, lost the Paris Masters final to Sinner and reached the semi-finals of the ATP Tour Finals to end the year as world number 5.

Now comes the next climb up the mountain, starting with a second-round match against Román Andrés Burruchaga, an Argentinian who loves clay tennis and reached the final of the U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championships in Houston this spring. After a difficult series of early exits, which followed a title at the Montepellier Open and a final at the Rotterdam Open, Auger-Aliassime is looking ahead.

“I’m happy with how things have evolved,” Auger-Aliassime said. “Sometimes I wish it was a little faster, that I got the results I wanted, but I know that will happen if I keep doing good work.”