Alejandro Davidovich Lost Five Straight Finals. Now He's Won Two Titles in One Year

Losing one final hurts. Losing five in a row sounds like a running joke the tour tells behind your back.

Alejandro Davidovich Fokina lived through it. He lost five straight finals, finally broke through, then came back from a back injury to win again in Chengdu. Two titles in one year is a neat stat, but the more interesting story is how a player gets from one to the other.

Why finals are their own kind of test

A final isn't just another match. There's one opponent, one trophy, no more rounds to fall back on and a crowd that knows exactly what's at stake. Players who cruise through the early rounds can tighten up once the finish line is right there.

Tennis has plenty of history on this. Ivan Lendl lost his first four Grand Slam finals before winning the 1984 French Open, and he did it by coming back from two sets down against John McEnroe. Andy Murray also lost his first four Grand Slam finals before winning the 2012 US Open, after taking Olympic gold at Wimbledon a few weeks earlier.

The pattern repeats. Some of the game's best players had to lose their way to the trophy.

The gap between good and winning

Davidovich has always been an entertaining player. He's quick, inventive and capable of shots nobody else on tour would try. Reaching five finals proves how good he is, and losing all five suggests something in the final's specific pressure wasn't being solved.

What that something was, only he can say. It could be tactical, mental, physical or a little of each. Outsiders love to diagnose it. It's usually more complicated than a single theory.

What's clear is that talent alone wasn't the missing piece, because it had already taken him to the last day of the tournament five times. The missing piece was the ability to finish.

The back injury complication

Then came the setback. Davidovich went through a back injury, and that kind of interruption can wreck momentum. For a player who had just learned how to win finals, the layoff came at a bad time.

Coming back and winning in Chengdu suggests the breakthrough wasn't a fluke. A player who wins once after a long drought might just have caught a good week. A player who wins again after an injury layoff has more evidence in his favour.

Chengdu is an ATP 250 event in China, part of the autumn Asia swing, so it doesn't carry the prestige of a Masters trophy. But titles are titles, and the second one matters for a reason that has nothing to do with prize money. It confirms the first.

What athletes actually change

It's tempting to say there's a clean lesson here about perseverance. That's too neat. Athletes who break long losing streaks don't usually discover a secret. They usually make small changes, take a few different decisions in key moments and get a bit of luck at the right time.

The luck deserves mention. A ball that clips the tape, a break point that goes one way, an opponent who cramps late: those swing finals as much as mentality does. Players who lose five in a row aren't necessarily doing something wrong. Sometimes it's just five bad coin flips in a row.

That doesn't reduce the achievement. It makes it more human. Davidovich had to keep walking into finals knowing the record against him, and he did it anyway.

The fun of a story like this is that the sport doesn't care about narrative. The next final starts at 0-0.

So is a losing streak in finals mostly a mental problem that eventually gets solved, or is it just variance that finally evened out? And does it matter, as long as the trophy ends up on the shelf?