17th seed Jack Sock was upset Thursday after falling to 217th ranked Sebastian Ofner of Austria 6-3, 6-4, 3-6, 2-6, 6-2. 21 year old Ofner who mainly plays futures, and challengers, recorded his first tour level win of any kind when he defeated Thomaz Bellucci on Tuesday.
Ofner, unknown to many has the tennis world talking about him now after he’s advanced to the third round seemingly out of nowhere. When he took the court last week during the qualifying rounds it was the first time he’s even appeared at a grand slam. In the last round of qualifying he defeated Great Britain’s Jay Clarke after coming back down 2 sets to 0. The live rankings have Ofner at a career high 150 with a chance to go even higher if he can get past Alexander Zverev in the 3rd round on Saturday
Ofner started his season playing futures (the lowest level of professional tennis) in cities like Heraklion, Greece, and Antalya, Turkey. His first big breakthrough came at a challenger in Mestre, Italy where he reached the final before falling to Joao Domingues of Portugal. After making the finals in Mestre his ranking rose 40 spots to 225 which helped him get to the point where he was ranked high enough to play Wimbledon qualifying. This same week last year Ofner was playing a $10,000 future event in Telfs, Austria and was ranked 571.
Before last week Ofner hadn’t even played a professional match at any level on grass courts, and list’s his favorite surface as clay. He’s also coached by Wolfgang Thiem (father of Dominic) and trains at Gunther Bresnik’s academy in Vienna, Austria.
The fact that the Austrian hasn’t even played in the main draw of a ATP 250 event, and now is in the 3rd round of Wimbledon shows that the quality of players on the tour are all so high and one break out week can help get them off the ITF circuit and closer to playing on the big stages of professional tennis around the world. A result like this can also help a player like Sebastian Ofner get more recognition in his home country. Later this month, there’s a 250 event in Kitzbuhel, Austria and I would be surprised if he wasn’t one of their three wildcards.
With Alexander Zverev next up for Ofner, I’m not sure the fairytale story of Sebastian Ofner has much life left to it but certainly nobody expected him to get this far so anything is possible. Regardless of the result, he’s already won this week.
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