The name Holger Rune has currently been buzzing around in the tennis world. Rune is a 19-year-old player from Denmark and is now the No.1 player in his country as well. The young Danish champion recently broke into the Top-50 with his first ATP title win.
Holger advanced to the finals of the Bavarian International tennis championship by defeating all the opponents in straight sets. The World No.3 Alexander Zverev too exited early at the hands of Rune at the ATP 250 tournament in Munich. In the final match, the Dutch player Botic van de Zandschulp had to retire in the very first round leading to a walkover match. This resulted in Holger Rune’s first ATP title of his tennis career.
The achievements and records of Holger Rune
Rune turned into a professional player only in 2020 when he was 16 years old. However, the Danish athlete started playing junior championships long before that.
Holger became an Under-12 mixed doubles champion in 2014 and won the European U-14 championship three years later. Rune joined the tennis academy of Patrick Mouratoglou for professional training in 2016.
Training session at the @MouratoglouAcad before flying to @CordobaOpen ???????????? pic.twitter.com/GFY3yuo3gR
— Holger Rune (@holgerrune2003) January 28, 2022
The 19-year-old hit a milestone when he clinched the French Open junior championship title by defeating Toby Alex Kodat of the USA in the year 2019. In the same year, Holger Rune won the ITF Junior finals and secured the ITF NO.1 ranking.
In the ATP Finals of 2019, Rune was chosen to be a practice partner.
The following year he debuted as a professional and broke into the Top-500 ATP ranking list. The year 2020 was the year when Rune won his first ITF title. After winning his first ITF title in Switzerland, Holger went on to win two of three other finals of ITF events that year.
His accomplishments of the year 2020, got Holger a wildcard entry at the Argentina Open the next year. This was his ATP tournament debut although he lost in the very first round at the hands of Albert Ramos Viñolas of Spain. Rune played in the Chile Open later that year as well. As he reached the quarter-finals of the event at the age of 17, the Danish player became the youngest ATP tourn quarter-finalist since 2014.
Biella Challenger event of 2021 was the first ATP Challenger title Holger Rune won. This was a bitter-sweet win for the 19-year-old as he was fined for his homophobic slurs in the pre-final round of the tournament.
Later in 2021, Holger received wildcard entries for tournaments like the Austrian Open, Swedish Open and Croatia Open. In the same year, Rune played his first Grand-Slam at the US Open after winning all the qualifiers. But he lost to Novak Djokovic in the very first round despite tough competition.
Earlier this year, Rune broke into the Top-100 rankings. With the No.99 rank, he became only the second-youngest male player next to Carlos Alcaraz in the Top-100 list.
Holger Rune’s career earning is a total amount of $682,494 of which he earned $292,855 this year alone.
With his Bavarian International win, he reached a career-high ranking of World No.45.