). Yuki Bhambri, our best male player of the current decade, won the Australian Open junior title 8 years ago (when he was 16 and a half years old), but has not played a single 12-month period injury-free in the subsequent 8 years. The longest injury-free period of his career lasted 9 months, and ended with him ranked 88 in singles; but getting to that point had taken so much out of him that he got injured, tried to come back (for a 3 month period) and then had to spend another 6 months off the circuit. He is now 3 months into yet another comeback. His first injury-free period (about 7 months) had taken him to #174 at the end of September 2012, his next one took him to #143 in February 2014, and finally we had the longest period that took him to #88 in November 2015. The patterns show that it takes 18 months to climb back and scale a new career-high. (So this time, end-May around the time of the French Open should be when Yuki gets to a new career-high, if he can stay injury-free).
Our most accomplished male tennis singles player of the 21st century to-date, Somdev DevVarman, was renowned for his physical fitness -- which offset the obvious lacunae in his game (such as a weak serve, and lack of real power in his groundstrokes). But eventually he too succumbed to physical frailties and injury, retiring before he was 31.
Saketh Myneni is already 30+, is effectively India's #2 for the past year, but is plagued by injury. His career culminated in a 5-set match in R1 of the 2016 US Open (his first main draw match in any ATP tournament) where he was undone on match-point by the umpire overruling the linesman (who had ruled that Saketh had won the match), with no video referral available on his court to adjudicate the matter. Since then, he has basically been injured (with a couple of appearances on tour ending prematurely).
Our next best singles player, Ramkumar Ramanathan, has been largely injury-free but has one glaring weakness (his backhand) that players in the top-150 can ruthlessly exploit.
Our fittest-ever tennis player, Leander Paes, rarely gets injured (apart from one major scare, when he had worms in his brain, which had initially been misdiagnosed as brain cancer). He has thus had an incredibly long and successful career, with 20 Slam titles. But he came of age during the transition from wood to synthetic racquets, and his coaches basically taught him how to master the old-fashioned tennis of the wooden age, not the new-fangled strokes (of an almost completely different sport) required in the age of synthetic racquets. His fitness has enabled him to overcome the enormous disadvantages of his initial tennis preparation (for which the Britannia Amritraj Tennis academy has a lot to answer for
). Basically, all future tennis players will need to learn Leander Paes' fitness regimen/techniques (no doubt helped by the fact that his dad is a sport-medicine doctor, and both he and Leander's mom were Olympian athletes) -- while learning to play tennis at least along the lines that Yuki mastered.
