Daniil Medvedev won the 2022 Los Cabos Open but it wasn't his coach who was leading his team at the event but rather his trainer Eric Hernandez.
Hernandez is Medvedev's fitness trainer since 2017 and the French trainer accompanies Medvedev on weeks when Cervara doesn't. Such was the case this year in Los Cabos where Hernandez was the man in charge. They know each other since 2017 when Cervara brought him into the team and it's been a superb relationship so far.
Hernandez said:
“Today, in my professional life, Danill is my priority. I owe him 25 weeks a year. Daniil has always kept a desire to work, he has never cut a session for me. But before 2017, it was not easy because he was reluctant to work. He found it hard, he had never trained in a very structured way, his lifestyle was that of a young player who didn’t forbid himself to go out. He did the physical training because everyone in tennis trains physically, but you could sense that he was wondering where the need was.”
Hernandez further revealed that Medvedev never dreamed of reaching the heights he reached remembering an instance where he looked at a poster of Federer in a gym:
“I remember sessions where he was looking at posters in the gym. He would look at, say, Federer, and think openly, ‘If I ever play a Grand Slam quarter-final, it will be really big. So the cost-benefit ratio was not obvious to him. He didn’t quite understand what he was doing. But with Gilles, we wanted him to understand.”
WProvdigin further insight in what it takes to become number one, Hernandez admitted:
"Today Daniil has five hours of intense work a day, in two blocks. With Gilles, we have managed to get him into this regularity. Daniil is one of the 10 or 15 players in the world who work the hardest, that’s obvious. And when you see the result, it’s fabulous. He is a kind of steamroller who is not very violent. He won’t crack first, he’s armed to do a lot of things and not many events can put him in a critical situation.”
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