Holger Rune suggested in a recent interview that his career-high World No. 4 rank was more 'a gift' than a 'result of his work.'
No one reaches a career-high ranking just by sheer luck, and the same applies to Rune. The young Dane reached his career-high ranking on August 21st, 2023, when he was ranked fourth in the world.
That came after he won the Paris Masters in 2022, which also secured him a Top 10 breakthrough. He earned 1,000 ATP ranking points for that win, but his points total on August 21st, 2023, was 4,790, meaning he had to be successful consistently throughout the year, and that was true, of course.
In 2023, he played in the semi-finals in Montpellier and Acapulco. The young Dane also played in the Monte-Carlo Masters final and won the Munich Open, before reaching the Italian Open final and making the quarter-final at Roland Garros.
Rune also reached the semi-finals at the Queen's Club and played in the Wimbledon quarter-final. All of these results were very consistent and impressive, and overall, they earned him the total of points that pushed him to the World No. 4 position.
However, as he revealed in a recent interview with Quindici Zero, Rune felt that he wasn't good enough to be ranked World No. 4 at the time, but instead, that he profited from bad results of his rivals.
"Honestly, I deserved to be in the Top 7 / Top 8 because of the results I achieved between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. But reaching the 4th place in the ranking was not a result of my work, it was a gift because of the results of the other players above me who did not defend the points from the previous year."
While certainly every result is deserved, and so was Rune's No. 4 rank, the 21-year-old might be right that he was helped to reach that position. Right now, the World No. 4 player is Novak Djokovic with 6,210 points, and the 4,790 points that Rune had in 2023 would be enough 'only' for the sixth position at the moment.
Still, that doesn't take anything away from his achievement. If his rivals didn't perform well enough, he just took advantage of that and was better at the time, so he was rewarded for that.
In 2022, Carlos Alcaraz was the World No. 1 player with 6,730 points. Today, that would put him at the World No. 4 position, with his points total looking incomparable to Jannik Sinner's current 11,920 points.
However, for Rune, it's not only about points and rankings and whether he deserved it or not. He wants to grow as a player, and he feels like right now, he is more ready for that breakthrough than he was back in 2023.
"At that moment I was not ready: my game was not Top 4, as well as my mentality. Now I feel like I have much more experience and this part is important, because you need to adapt in the right way to stay at that level."
"Some people do it faster than others, I feel comfortable in every aspect of the game now: this makes the mental aspect less demanding and generates energy to develop my game again. So now I feel good about all of this."
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