Norwegian tennis player Casper Ruud beat American Taylor Fritz on Tuesday and thus secured a place in the semi-finals of the ATP final, which is played in Turin in Italy 3, 4/6 and 7/6 (8/6), after 2 hours and 11 minutes.

The other semi-finalist of the Greens group will come out of this Thursday’s clash between Fritz and the Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime, who earlier beat the Spaniard Rafael Nadal, eliminated with two defeats in two games.

Ruud, who was a finalist at Roland Garros and the US Open this year, thus finds the semi-finals of the ATP finals, after being beaten last year during his first participation in the tournament by the Russian Daniil Medvedev.

This Tuesday, he took advantage of Fritz’s difficulties to come on and managed to break in the American’s first service game, maintaining the advantage until the end of the first set.

But Fritz, who is playing for the first time in the tournament, had time to recover in the match and equalize the dispute, in a second set where the Norwegian abused unforced errors. In the third set, the two players faced each other until the tie-break, which resulted in victory for Ruud on his third match point.

Marco Bertorello/AFP

Earlier, Nadal had been beaten by Auger-Aliassime and was on the verge of elimination, confirmed by Ruud’s victory over Fritz in the first set. The Canadian closed the match in 2 sets to 0 – with partials of 6/3 and 6/4, after 1 hour and 57 minutes.

Beaten last Sunday by Fritz on his debut, also in straight sets, the Spaniard bids farewell to the ATP Finals, the only major trophy missing from his vast gallery of titles. Champion of two Grand Slam tournaments this season (Australian Open and Roland Garros), Nadal was fragile at the end of 2022.

It was the Canadian’s first victory in their third meeting with Nadal, who in turn suffered his fourth straight loss, something that hadn’t happened since November 2009.

Nadal’s elimination guarantees fellow Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz to finish the season as world number 1. At 19, he had already become the youngest tennis player in history to reach the top of the ATP rankings (since 1973), after winning the US Open in September.

Now, he also happens to be the youngest to finish the season as the best tennis player in the world. Moreover, he is the first to achieve the feat without being one of the members of the so-called “Big 4” (Nadal, the Swiss Roger Federer, the Serbian Novak Djokovic and the British Andy Murray) since the American Andy Roddick in 2003.