Carrying the hopes of a new Spanish generation
Alejandro Davidovich Fokina is such an entertaining player that he is often underestimated. He loves surprising his opponents with drop shots, and he has been known to throw in the occasional underarm serve. But when a young Taylor Fritz played the then 21-year-old Spaniard in Estoril, the American was overheard telling his box, “I’ve played Nishikori and Djokovic - he is hitting the ball like them.”
Born to a Swedish-Russian father, Eduard Mark Davidovich, and a Russian mother, Tatiana Fokina, in Malaga, a port city on Spain’s Costa del Sol, Davidovich Fokina has been playing tennis for as long as he can remember. His father was once a boxer, but he wasn’t keen on his son following in his footsteps. So, when Davidovich Fokina was just two years old, his dad put a tennis racquet in his hand.
“I started with my father on the beach, in the sand courts in my city,” he told reporters at Wimbledon in 2017, after he had won the boys’ singles to become Spain’s first junior Grand Slam champion since Manuel Orantes half a century earlier.
By the time he was six, he was training in the small Malaga suburb of La Cala del Moral with coach Manolo Rubiales. At age 11, Davidovich Fokina switched to working with Jorge Aguirre at the Racket Club in nearby Fuengirola, a relationship that lasted 15 years until 2024, by which time the player was well established in the world’s top 50. He still lives in Fuengirola.
