The personal side of Alex de Mignaur, Nadal’s Mutua Madrid Open opponent: from his tennis girlfriend to his Spanish mother (and why he stopped playing for Spain)

When De Minaur was five years old, his family moved to Alicante. because they didn’t renew the restaurant’s lease with their parents. There he grew up, went to school and, above all, began to play tennis seriously. At the age of 12, he was already one of the strongest players in Spanish tennis and was trained by Adolfo Gutierrez (with whom he continues to work to this day after fighting with the Australian federation for the right to be his coach in the elite).

His father’s car wash business began to do poorly due to the economic crisis, and the family was faced with the question of whether or not to return to Australia. The only argument for staying in Spain was Alex’s promising tennis career, but they needed financial support and ““We asked the Spanish and Valencian federations for help, but they told us it was not possible.”– said his mother Esther Roman in an open letter to Spanish in 2018, in which he detailed the series of circumstances that led De Minaur to stop playing for Spain.

His situation reached the ears of Todd Woodbridge, an Australian tennis player who personally invited De Minaur to Roland Garros to play him and test his level. “Within two minutes he wrote me an email asking me to send him to Sydney and that the Australian federation would cover everything. Trainings, coaches, trips…” said Esther. “We ended up moving to Australia. “I didn’t want to, but we moved.”

Miguel Diaz, the president of the Spanish federation, subsequently tried to change his mind, but this was impossible. According to Roman: “Alex played for Spain until we returned to Australia. His first tournaments in the lower categories were played for Spain. My whole family is Spanish. For example, “My parents desperately wanted the boy to play for the Spanish national team… but the Spanish federation arrived late, very late.”