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| Roger Federer won his 20th Grand Slam at the Australian Open recently |
Roger Federer is undoubtedly the greatest tennis player of all time and is still currently ranked as the number 2 singles player in the world at the age of 36. The Swiss professional has now been playing for 20 years since making his debut in the 1998 ATP Tour and has managed to win 82% of the 1389 singles games that has played over the years.
He first entered the top 100 rankings in 1999 but it wasn’t until 2001 that he won his first major tournament being the Hopman Cup while representing Switzerland in the mixed doubles with Martina Hingis. His first singles win came the same year at the 2001 Milan Indoor tournament but his first real international breakthrough came at the Wimbledon Championships the same year when at just 19-years-old Federer played and defeated the seven-time Wimbledon champion Pete Sampras and progressed to the Quarter-finals where he was subsequently knocked out by Tim Henman.
In 2003 Federer won his first ever grand slam singles title at Wimbledon following victory’s over Andy Roddick and Mark Philippoussis. Later that year he had his first ever chance to become the world number 1 singles player however, a few losses late that year meant that he didn’t quite manage to overtake Andy Roddick that year. Moving forward to 2004 the real dominance of Federer started to shine through as he won three grand slam singles titles over the course of the year finishing with a record of 74-6 and reaching world number 1 for the first time.
The following year was another successful one and saw him facing Rafeal Nadal, his main rival, for the first time. Although he missed out on the Australian Open and the French open, he still managed to win Wimbledon and pick up 11 singles titles finishing the year with a very impressive win percentage of 95.2%. Finishing the year on such a high put Federer in a great position going into 2006 where he had statistically the best season of his career. He reached the final of all 4 Grand Slams winning 3 but unfortunately losing to Nadal in the French open, this was the first time they had met in a Grand Slam final but certainly not the last. He managed to reach 16 out of the 17 tournaments he entered during the year coming away with $8,343,855 in prize money. One of his personal highlights for this year was returning to his home town in Basel and winning the Swiss Indoors tournament having not won it previously.
Now Federer had established his dominance in the game he has continued to win tournaments over the years most recently winning the Hopman Cup with Belinda Bencic and also winning the Australian Open after beating Marin Cilic in the final in turn securing his 6th Australian Open of his career. In addition to this he recently became the first man to win 20 Grand Slam titles and will be hoping that he can knock Nadal off the top spot and become world number one again this year. If you’re interested in betting on the Tennis, then be sure to check out Oddschanger for daily betting tips as well as weekly insights into the world of tennis. Federer currently has a 100%-win record in 2018 and the next major tournament he will play will be the Rotterdam Open for the 9th time in his career, he only needs to make the semi-finals here to become the oldest ATP world number one of all time.
