{"id":83145,"date":"2025-05-04T22:00:44","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T02:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=83145"},"modified":"2025-05-06T01:07:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-06T05:07:10","slug":"alex-michelsen-wins-estoril","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/05\/04\/alex-michelsen-wins-estoril\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Michelsen Enjoys the Lifestyle in Portugal and Takes Home Estoril Title"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5>Estoril, Portugal\u2013<\/h5>\n<p>The first (and hopefully only) edition of the Estoril Open as a Challenger 175 event ended up crowning Alex Michelsen, who won his first ever title on clay (at any level) and the biggest title of his career to date (having lost three ATP 250 finals).<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Alex Michelsen vs Andrea Pellegrino | ESTORIL FINAL 2025\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kir-jt0bm2Q?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It might sound surprising that the world #32 is yet to win an ATP title, but he is still 20 years old and there are surely many in his future. His ability to play at a high level on clay was certainly questionable, but this week he showed that he has the ability to excel on this surface too, winning this tournament without dropping a single set and showing some great tennis. He didn&#8217;t exactly have an easy draw, beating the Kecmanovic in the semis and good clay players in Nardi and Fonio in the first two rounds before beating Pellegrino in the final today.<\/p>\n<div class=\"getty embed image\" style=\"background-color: #fff; display: inline-block; font-family: Roboto,sans-serif; color: #a7a7a7; font-size: 11px; width: 100%; max-width: 594px;\">\n<div style=\"padding: 0; margin: 0; text-align: left;\"><a style=\"color: #a7a7a7; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal !important; border: none; display: inline-block;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/2212826672\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><\/div>\n<div style=\"overflow: hidden; position: relative; height: 0; padding: 66.66667% 0 0 0; width: 100%;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"display: inline-block; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; margin: 0;\" src=\"\/\/embed.gettyimages.com\/embed\/2212826672?et=yJKmJD9GRHJfY8wWpfrXtA&amp;tld=com&amp;sig=T5S0obmzKmDwv9Bqk1CGxzvr9HbEQQ99orhDPq-BxIs=&amp;caption=true&amp;ver=1\" width=\"594\" height=\"396\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Pellegrino had a great run this week, beating Jarry, Aliassime, Vukic and Lajovic after coming through qualifying and he too showed the ability to signficantly rise up the rankings soon, but at this point it is Michelsen who is the clear better player of the two and someone who projects to enter the top 30 soon and stay there for a long time.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from the trophy, Michelsen also really enjoyed his experience in Estoril, comparing the town to California.<em> \u201cThe people here is amazing. The food, the beach. I\u2019m Californian, this reminds me of California. It feels like home away from home\u201d<\/em>, he said. Given how well he played here this week, how significant this title is for his career and how much he enjoyed the city, you can expect Michelsen to return in 2026 to try and defend this title, this time against even tougher opposition as it will be back to ATP status.<\/p>\n<p>Main Photo Credit: Andy Abeyta\/The Desert Sun \/ USA TODAY NETWORK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Estoril, Portugal\u2013 The first (and hopefully only) edition of the Estoril Open as a Challenger 175 event ended up crowning Alex Michelsen, who won his first ever title on clay (at any level) and the biggest title of his career to date (having lost three ATP 250 finals). It might sound surprising that the world [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1742,"featured_media":66486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8552,10,2,9],"tags":[18656,12820,3188,2849,7542,1690,2853],"class_list":["post-83145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp-challenger-tour","category-editorials","category-featured","category-news","tag-alex-michelsen","tag-andrea-pellegrino","tag-atp-challenger-tour","tag-atp-estoril","tag-atp-tennis","tag-challenger-tour","tag-estoril-open"],"modified_by":"Steen Kirby","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83145"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83151,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83145\/revisions\/83151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}