Return to 2002: Freestyle Superstar

Chapter 673: Announcement of Year-End Comeback
This year's US Open has also come to an end. Djokovic defeated Nadal and won the second Grand Slam title in his career.

This process is indeed very different from the previous life.

According to the original trajectory, after Djokovic won the Australian Open for the first time in 2008, he waited for three years until 2011 to win the Grand Slam title for the second time.

Under Chen Ran's suppression, this guy's progress was astonishing.

Or perhaps Federer and Nadal, who were supposed to be obstacles to Djokovic, have been half-crippled by Chen Ran, greatly reducing the pressure on him to win the championship.

This is the change that Chen Ran has brought to men's professional tennis.

After the US Open, Nadal, like Chen Ran, announced his withdrawal from the Chinese season and the European Indoor season due to injury. Whether he will participate in the year-end finals depends on his recovery from the injury.

After seeing this news, Chen Ran was in a daze for a long time, and then a thought popped up in his mind: Did I betray Nadal?

In his previous life, when it comes to injuries, there is no doubt that Nadal suffered the most serious one among the Big Three.

He became famous at a young age, turned professional at the age of 16, and won the French Open at the age of 19. However, because he turned professional too early, Nadal suffered from injuries of varying degrees all over his body.

This time, Chen Ran chose to take a vacation after the Olympics, and Nadal was also injured, but for this rare opportunity to compete in the US Open, he had to go through the competition with the injury. As a result, he beat Federer but lost to Djokovic.

Covered with injuries and exhausted both physically and mentally, he will inevitably choose to withdraw from the Chinese season and the European Indoor season.

"Originally, 2008 was the most glorious year in Rafael's career, but it was completely ruined by me." Chen Ran couldn't help but sigh.

So far, Chen Ran has 16 Grand Slam titles, Federer has 3, Djokovic has 2, and Nadal has only one.

Nowadays, although Roddick, Safin and Ferrero are still active players and have Grand Slam titles, the outside world generally believes that these three may still be competitive in the tour, but have lost their competitiveness in Grand Slam level competitions.

Thus, a situation of one superpower and three strong countries began to take shape.

"For Chen Ran, his most brilliant season was undoubtedly 2007, when he achieved the unprecedented Super Grand Slam, which is the four Grand Slam titles plus the year-end finals championship. This achievement has surpassed Graf's annual Golden Slam in 1988."

"But he did overdraw too much to achieve this honor. In 2008, Chen Ran lost to Djokovic at the Australian Open. Although he won the French Open, Wimbledon, and Olympic gold medals afterwards, he overdrawn himself again."

"We believe his dominance has begun to loosen."

Foreign sports media analyzed it seriously.

Then, as everyone knows, the domestic media in China are pure porters, quoting those articles verbatim and adding some exaggerated headlines to attract views and comments.

For a while, rumors from the outside world were rampant, and people were talking about how serious Chen Ran's injuries were.

After all, he has never missed a game for such a long time since his debut.

Without Chen Ran, ATP also seemed very anxious.

This year, Chen Ran has not appeared in the tour, which has greatly reduced the attention of the Chinese market that they have cultivated with great difficulty.

Tennis is like this, in addition to paying attention to their own players, fans also pay attention to superstars.

As a local player and a superstar, the attention Chen Ran receives is naturally unimaginable.

Now, he is absent from the China season, making the lively occasion of previous years become much quieter.

However, despite the constant rumors from outside, Chen Ran, as the real person, never responded.

But a few days later, Chen Ran announced through his team that he would participate in the year-end finals.

As soon as the news came out, the ticket booking hotline of the Shanghai ticketing agency was instantly flooded with calls!
Currently, after deducting the huge points from last year's US Open and China Open, Chen Ran's world ranking has dropped to fifth place.

Ahead of him, Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Davydenko.

However, apart from the top three, Davydenko, who ranked fourth, was ridiculed by the media as the most inflated ranking.

After all, this guy is such a hard worker. He has participated in almost all competitions, big and small, with almost no rest, and still got enough points.

This time, because Chen Ran was on rest, Davydenko moved to fourth place, surpassing Chen Ran, which shocked the fans for a while.

Unfortunately, the Russian market is too small, and Sharapova and Safin have almost taken away all the star power. Even if Davydenko is ranked fourth in the world, his commercial value is still far behind other top players.

"This is your first time participating in the year-end finals as a non-world number one. What a different feeling."

After Chen Ran announced that he would participate in the year-end finals, he also accepted interviews from the media.

"Really? Is this really my first time? I didn't even notice it!" Chen Ran is not as careful as the reporter. "But this is interesting. I'm not a seeded player this time, so I'll treat myself as a newcomer." "But to be honest, I'm really sad about the recent score deductions. It's either 2000 or 1000 points. This doesn't even include last year's 500 and 250 points."

He joked, his tone very lighthearted.

But the cruel fact is that this is the ATP rule, and they are not willing to let you have too much rest time.

Chen Ran's record was extremely impressive, and his year-end points reached an unprecedented 12000+ points.

But after a wave of points deductions this year, no matter how many points he had, they were not enough.

If the year-end points are deducted again, he will probably be seeded eighth or even outside the top eight at next year's Australian Open.

Although for Chen Ran today, the world ranking no longer proves anything, after all, he has been sitting in the top position for a long time.

"How is your recovery going?"

“We’ll know when we play the game.”

Chen Ran felt that the pain had almost disappeared during his recent training.

But the intensity of training cannot be compared with that of a real competition.

Chen Ran needs to go through high-intensity competition to feel how his body has recovered.

As a professional player who can shift up and down at any time to compete, it is not difficult to do this.

After all, this was the longest time Chen Ran had been absent from a game, so he handled everything very carefully.

As long as his body recovers well, even if he fails to keep the huge points at the end of the year and his ranking continues to drop, Chen Ran is still full of confidence in next year's Australian Open.

In addition, this is the last year-end finals in Shanghai after all. From Chen Ran’s perspective, he is also willing to buy tickets for them.

After all, the other Chinese seasons once again became a stage for foreign players.

This makes the audience feel as if they are in another world, as if everything has returned to before 2002. It is so far away that the memory is almost blurred.

As for Chen Ran, it was the first time since his rebirth that he observed this year's China season as an outsider.

Compared with his previous life, he discovered a huge change.

For example, in women's tennis, there is Li Na, who just won the Olympic Games, and Zheng Jie, the former French Open champion. There is also a new generation of golden flowers emerging, and the most promising one is Zhang Shuai, who is only 19 years old.

Therefore, the audience enthusiasm for WTA competitions is quite good.

Especially when China Stadium is involved.

But ATP is different.

In theory, ATP competitions are much more exciting than WTA competitions. Many world-class players have come to China. Even if there are no Chinese male players, the audience's enthusiasm will theoretically be very high.

It won’t be too different from the WTA.

But the Chinese football fans in this time and space have become very picky in their tastes because of Chen Ran.

Since Chen Ran is not here, and there are no other outstanding Chinese male players, the enthusiasm of Chinese fans for ATP competitions has been greatly reduced.

How about Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic?

They were all defeated by Chen Ran.

Other world-class generals are also Chen Ran’s group of male servants.

Chen Ran's success means that Chinese tennis has also been successful, and it also makes those Chinese fans have a superior mentality.

As a result, the ATP competition in the Chinese season was unexpectedly cold.

It's like when the Basketball World Championships are held in China, every game is sold out, but when it's held in the United States, apart from the American team, basically no one cares about the games of other teams, even though basketball is very popular in the United States. This is a fact.

"So there must be more competitive male players. Otherwise, without me, the ATP competitions held in China will not be as popular as in the past." Chen Ran also came to this conclusion.

……

(End of this chapter)