Alex de Minaur: seven major quarter-finals and still no semi-final

Alex de Minaur

Photo: si.robi / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 17, 1999 Sydney
Occupation	Tennis Player
Awards	Rotterdam Open champion · Washington Open champion · Mexican Open champion · Cincinnati Masters doubles champion · Australian Open boys' doubles champion

Alex de Minaur has reached the last eight of every Grand Slam tournament, and not one round further. Seven times he has walked into a major quarter-final; seven times he has left without a semi-final, and once, at Wimbledon, without being able to walk on court at all. That record is the hinge of a career that has climbed, this year, into the world’s top five on the strength of the quickest legs in men’s tennis. The question now is narrower than it sounds: whether a player built to make every point long can find the shot that makes the best players’ afternoons short.

The nickname arrived with the surname. Australians flatten “de Minaur” into something close to “Demon”, and he made the joke his own, sketching a small devil on the camera lens after wins. The rest of the identity is less tidy. His father, Anibal, is Uruguayan; his mother, Esther, is Spanish, and the two met in the Italian restaurant Anibal owned on George Street in Sydney, where Esther had taken a job waiting tables. He carries Australian and Spanish passports, speaks Spanish as easily as English and spent most of his childhood in Alicante.

He was born in Sydney on 17 February 1999 and lived his first five years in the southern suburb of Carss Park before the family moved to Spain. The Spanish financial crisis sent them back to Australia in 2012, when he was 13,. “I used to represent Spain but I always felt I was Australian,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017. Adolfo Gutierrez, who started working with him in Alicante when he was nine, has coached him ever since, while Lleyton Hewitt, never officially his coach, became his mentor and later his Davis Cup captain. As a junior he rose to No. 2 in the world and won the 2016 Australian Open boys’ doubles title with Blake Ellis.

The tour noticed him in Brisbane in January 2018. He arrived on a wildcard, reached the semi-finals as the youngest player to get that far in the event’s history, and a week later played the Sydney final. By the end of that season he had replaced Nick Kyrgios as Australia’s top-ranked man and finished runner-up at the Next Gen ATP Finals. In 2019 he won his first three titles, in Sydney, Atlanta and Zhuhai, and went through the whole Atlanta week without facing a single break point.

The climb after that was steady rather than sudden. He reached his first major quarter-final at the 2020 US Open, where Dominic Thiem, the eventual champion, stopped him, and that summer he won the Cincinnati Masters doubles title with Pablo Carreño Busta. In Toronto that August he beat Taylor Fritz and Daniil Medvedev back to back to reach his first Masters 1000 final, which he lost to Jannik Sinner. Then, at the United Cup in January 2024, he beat Novak Djokovic 6–4, 6–4, his first win over a world No. 1, and became the first Australian man in the top 10 since Hewitt in 2006.

The 2024 season filled in the map. He won Acapulco for a second straight year, beat Medvedev on the way to the Roland Garros quarter-finals, the first Australian man to get there since Hewitt in 2004, won on grass at ‘s-Hertogenbosch, reached the US Open quarter-finals and made his ATP Finals debut in Turin. Wimbledon produced the cruellest line on his record: he beat Arthur Fils to reach the quarter-finals and then withdrew with a hip injury before he could play one. When he reached the Australian Open quarter-finals the following January, he had been to the last eight at all four majors.

The admiring version of the story thins out here. De Minaur wins by moving, retrieving and building points patiently, and his serve is the softest of any man who has spent long in the top 10, short on power and prone to double faults. Critics have argued for years that he has no shot that genuinely hurts the best players, and that a style this physical will not last. The record against the very top supports them. He finished 2025 having lost all 12 of his matches against Sinner, the last of them in the semi-finals of the ATP Finals. At the US Open that September he led Félix Auger-Aliassime by a set and a break in the quarter-finals, served for a fifth set at 5–3 in the fourth and lost after four hours and ten minutes. Australia reached the Davis Cup final in 2022 and again in 2023, and both times it was his singles defeat, to Auger-Aliassime and then to Sinner, that settled it.

The ranking is the counter-argument. Nobody reaches the top five on legs alone, and his volleys and his serve-plus-forehand patterns have pulled him further forward in the court than his reputation admits.

The year that brought it has swung hard both ways. The 2026 season opened with a second straight Australian Open quarter-final, ended by Carlos Alcaraz on his way to the title, and in February he won Rotterdam at the third attempt, beating Auger-Aliassime 6–3, 6–2 for his 11th ATP title and his first indoors. Roland Garros ended in the third round against Jakub Menšík, Wimbledon in the fourth against Flavio Cobolli. On 13 July he moved up to No. 5, the first Australian man in the top five for 17 years and only the seventh ever; Rod Laver and Hewitt are among the other six. The day before, on the weekend of the Wimbledon final, he had married the British player Katie Boulter, his partner since 2020, in a small private ceremony.

Then the season turned. A second-round loss to Botic van de Zandschulp at the US Open dropped him to ninth, and he flew straight to Brisbane to train with Hewitt before Australia’s Davis Cup tie against Poland. He won both of his singles there, clinching the 3–1 victory against Kamil Majchrzak, the man who had beaten him in the ‘s-Hertogenbosch final in June. “I haven’t plateaued in my career,” he said that week. “I’m hungry for more and feel I’ve got the opportunities to achieve it.” In Beijing in October he reached the China Open final and retired against Djokovic at 7–6, 0–1 with a strained left adductor, and still reached the Shanghai quarter-finals, where Alexander Zverev beat him.

In Vienna this week he came from a set down to beat Tomáš Macháč in the first round of the Erste Bank Open, a win that keeps a third straight trip to Turin in play. His next opponent, on 28 October, is Learner Tien, the 20-year-old American who also wins with patience rather than a serve. After that comes the Australian summer and Melbourne, where the one round he has never won is waiting for him again.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis, Novak Djokovic, Jannik Sinner, ATP Tour, Katie Boulter, Alex de Minaur, Davis Cup