Is there anything specific that your friends or your family or your team told you?

No—everyone was just very proud of how I handled the situation: how I played tennis, yes, but also how I handled the situation after the loss. The only thing I wanted to do after that was to go back home to my parents and stay there and surround myself again with friends. That’s exactly how I felt when I first left home when I was 13 years old [to train full-time for tennis], and I was searching again for these kind of feelings.

Do I understand it right that at that time, when you were 13 and you decided to leave home to pursue tennis, you were actually only playing maybe twice a week?

In the summer, yes—in winter, I was only playing once a week, maybe; there were weeks where I didn’t play at all, because I was skiing and then I was playing indoor football with my friends. I never really played tennis until I was basically 12 years old, but then I put away the skis and started to play more football and also more tennis. But I never had one full week of practice—I had two or three sessions each week. I also never used to go to the gym, because I was always in nature.

It’s just amazing to me.

I lived my childhood how I wanted to, and this is also thanks to my parents, who gave me the possibility to ski and play tennis—and I come from a normal family. As I said earlier, we never would’ve thought to be in the position we are in now. It’s all very surprising, still, for all of us.

Does coming to tennis so relatively late mean that when you were very young, your childhood sports dreams had nothing to do with tennis? Did you dream about scoring the game-winning goal in the World Cup—or winning the downhill skiing gold at Kitzbühel or something?

No—when I was young, my dream was always to become a Formula 1 driver, but we never had money, and we understood straightaway that Formula 1 is so expensive, so we didn’t even try. It was completely impossible to even think it. Later, when I started playing tennis, you could say my dream was to win some tournaments on the pro tour or whatever, but that was just not realistic: It was just a dream, not a goal. I never said my goal was to become number one in the world; most likely, that could only be a dream. It was not realistic in my head.