Dominic Thiem: Greatness, Interrupted
He is the only man in the Open era to win a US Open final from two sets down. He is also the last player with a one-handed backhand to win any Grand Slam title, and the first man born in the 1990s to win one, ending a run of sixty-three majors claimed by players born in the 1980s. Three records, all set on the same September night in 2020 in an empty Flushing Meadows stadium. Nine months later a wrist gave way in Mallorca and none of it was ever built on.
Lichtenwörth
Dominic Thiem was born on 3 September 1993 in Wiener Neustadt and grew up in Lichtenwörth. Both his parents, Wolfgang and Karin, were tennis coaches; his younger brother Moritz also turned professional. When Dominic was three his father joined Günter Bresnik's academy in Vienna, and Bresnik formally took him on at nine.
The decision that shaped the career came at twelve, when Bresnik told him to abandon his two-handed backhand for a one-hander. It made him worse for years — his junior results suffered — and it made him, eventually, the most distinctive ball-striker of his generation. At seventeen he grew sixteen centimetres in a year and spent much of it unwell.
He reached world No. 2 in the junior rankings by January 2011, was runner-up at the French Open boys' event that year and won the Orange Bowl, finishing with a junior record of 115-33 that included wins over Lucas Pouille and Kyle Edmund.
The Climb
He turned professional in 2011, entered the top 100 in 2014 and became the youngest player to finish that year inside the top 50, at 39. His first tour title came at Nice in 2015 against Leonardo Mayer. In 2016 he won four titles including his first ATP 500 in Acapulco and reached the French Open semi-finals. By 2017 he was world No. 4.
Then came three years in which he was the only man consistently capable of hurting all three of the game's monuments. He beat Roger Federer in the 2019 Indian Wells final for his first Masters 1000 title. He finished in the top ten five years running, from 2016 to 2020, accumulated thirty-two career top-ten wins, and took five wins each off Federer and Djokovic and six off Nadal — making him one of only two players, with Andy Murray, to record five or more wins against each member of the Big Three.
The majors kept ending one match early. He lost the 2018 French Open final to Nadal in straight sets and the 2019 rematch in four, having beaten Djokovic in a five-set semi-final played across two days. Nadal said Thiem was the most difficult opponent of that 2019 championship. At the 2020 Australian Open he beat Nadal in a quarter-final decided by three tiebreaks, then Zverev, then led Djokovic by two sets to one in the final and lost in five. He lost the 2019 ATP Finals decider to Stefanos Tsitsipas and the 2020 edition to Daniil Medvedev, having beaten Djokovic in the semi.
Flushing Meadows
On 2 March 2020 he reached No. 3 in the world, passing Federer. That September, seeded second at the US Open, he lost the first two sets of the final to Alexander Zverev and then won it 2-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 7-6 — the first man to come from two sets down in a major final since the 2004 French Open, and the first Austrian to win the US Open. He was voted Austrian Sportsman of the Year, only the fourth tennis player so honoured since 1949.
The Wrist
On 29 June 2021, leading Adrian Mannarino 5-2 at the Mallorca Championships, he injured his right wrist and retired from the match. He withdrew from Wimbledon and then from the rest of the season.
The comeback never took. He returned at the 2022 Marbella Challenger, lost in the first round to Pedro Cachin and tested positive for COVID-19. A first-round exit at the French Open dropped him out of the top 300. He clawed back inside the top 100 by October 2022 without ever again resembling the player who had beaten Nadal on clay. In 2023 he played mostly Challengers. In May 2024 he announced he would retire after that October's Vienna Open; his last Grand Slam appearance came as a US Open wildcard, and his final match, on 23 October 2024, was a straight-sets first-round loss to Luciano Darderi in Vienna. He finished with seventeen titles, a 348-215 singles record and $30,381,559 in prize money, seventeenth on the all-time list.
Why Dominic Is Called a Genius
The word, with Thiem, points at a physical and technical accomplishment, not an intellectual one, and the honest version is quite specific: he built the heaviest groundstrokes on the tour around the least forgiving shot in tennis. A one-handed backhand struck with that much topspin and racquet-head speed demands near-perfect timing and preparation — there is no second hand to rescue a late swing — and at 1.85m with a serve reaching 145 mph he was hitting it harder than anyone. The astonishing part is that the shot was a deliberate construction, chosen for him at twelve at the cost of years of results, and then drilled until it became a weapon capable of pushing Rafael Nadal off a clay baseline.
The second faculty is a competitive one. Coming back from two sets down in a major final is not a technical act; it is a problem of managing a collapsing match, and no man had done it at the US Open in the Open era. Adaptability is part of it too — he had been dismissed as a clay-court specialist and won his major on hard courts, having added slice and net play after Aaron Wirth joined his coaching team in 2019.
The counter-case writes itself. One major from four finals. A career-high of No. 3, never No. 1. Two French Open finals lost to Nadal and an Australian Open final lost from a two-sets-to-one lead. His style — enormous, physical, played from far behind the baseline — imposed a load his body eventually refused, and a wrist injury at twenty-seven ended the serious phase of his career. He was the best of the players who were not quite the Big Three, which is a real distinction and a limited one.
Legacy
Thiem is the answer to a question tennis will keep asking: who broke the 1980s generation's grip on the majors. He did it once, spectacularly, with a shot the sport is slowly abandoning. Every subsequent Grand Slam has been won with two hands on the backhand, and until that changes he holds a small, elegant record — the last of the one-handers to lift a major trophy.
Achievements
- Worked as tennis player
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