“Kæmpe chock!” blared Danish headlines following Boris Becker’s announcement earlier this week that he is standing down as Holger Rune’s head coach. Yet how far it was really a “huge shock” is debatable. Becker was the second high-profile departure from Rune’s team in the space of a week, following the exit of Severin Lüthi on the final day of January, and the Danish world No 7 has now gone through four coaches in a year. The German’s departure may bear the semblance of a surprise, but it is part of a recurring pattern.
The pity of it is that the partnership appeared to be working so well. When Becker joined Rune’s team on a trial basis last October, the impact was immediate. Almost overnight, the 20-year-old’s post-Wimbledon slump of eight defeats in nine matches was arrested, his form and confidence surging back as deep runs in Basel and Paris secured a maiden appearance at the ATP Finals. It was a reminder of the wealth of expertise – “more mental and tactical than technical,” Rune explained – that Becker brings to the table.
The German’s influence was plain but, before long, so too were the competing “professional and private responsibilities” to which he alluded on taking his leave. The conflict was starkly illustrated during the Australian Open, where Rune slumped to a shock second-round exit against Arthur Cazaux as Becker offered commentary on the match from a Eurosport studio in Munich.
Given Becker’s media commitments and the travel restrictions resulting from his conviction for tax evasion in 2022, it was clear from the outset that the former world No 1 would be unable to accompany Rune to every major tournament. All parties will have been alive to that reality when the decision was taken last November to extend Becker’s tenure as head coach, and perhaps it had some bearing on the subsequent recruitment of Lüthi, Roger Federer’s former coach, and Kenneth Carlsen, the former Danish No 1, both of whom accompanied Rune in Melbourne.
Either way, the fact that those appointments were made complicates Becker’s suggestion that he underestimated the scope of the job. They created the impression of a player surrounding himself with an experienced and highly accomplished team capable of dealing with any eventuality, not least any shortfall in availability. But while Rune appeared determined to leave no stone unturned in his quest to keep pace with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, maintaining his position among the trio of twentysomethings tipped to inherit the mantle of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, Becker stressed in his departure announcement that his initial focus was more immediate.
“We started this partnership with the initial goal to reach the ATP Finals end of last year but moving forward I realised that in order for this to be successful, I would need to be available for Holger much more than I can,” Becker wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Due to professional and private responsibilities, I can’t give Holger what he needs now. I wish him only the very best and I’m always going to be his No 1 fan.”
Becker’s evident warmth towards his former charge is understandable, given the faith Rune showed in him at a difficult juncture in his life. What is harder to fathom is why the scale of the commitment should only have dawned on Becker so belatedly. It is not as though the German, himself a six-time grand slam champion and former world No 1, suddenly found himself adrift in unfamiliar waters. Having guided Djokovic to six major titles in three years following his appointment as the Serb’s coach in 2013, Becker’s appreciation of what it takes to mentor a top player with grand slam aspirations is second to none.
That the German’s exit is a mirror image of Lüthi’s – sudden, amicable, attributed to time constraints – only adds to the curiousness of the situation. Rune’s mother, Aneke, has claimed “it would be too few weeks for Severin to be able to cover for the continuity that Holger needs” and, while she welcomed efforts by Lüthi to alter Rune’s routine in principle, she has questioned both the decision to introduce those changes during the Australian Open and an alleged delay in the Swiss’s availability to see the process through.
“If you come in and you want to implement a lot of changes in the routines that the player normally does, this is great,” Aneke told the Craig Shapiro Tennis Podcast. “Because if you’re No 7, you’re not the best in the world, so you need to do things differently in order to improve.
“What is tough is starting to do the things at a grand slam. If we look back, it was not the right timing to implement new stuff, because the player is obviously more nervous at grand slams. Also, what really was not a good fit was the next time we were supposed to see Severin – I didn’t have the schedule before Melbourne – was at the end of March.
“To follow up on the changes that you want to do, and not see the player for two months – maybe if you were 25 or 27, this would work. But if you’re 20, you need continuously to repeat the things you want to do.”
Fair enough, but Rune is no ordinary 20-year-old, and one wonders why, in Lüthi’s absence, a player possessed of the Dane’s work ethic could not have embarked on that process of repetition in tandem with Carlsen. Rune is clearly a man in a hurry but, as illustrated by the process of incremental evolution that has made a grand slam champion of Sinner, change takes time – a commodity apparently in short supply in Team Rune.
Following his exit, Lüthi told the Swiss newspaper Blick that the partnership was “anything but a quick fix”. But was there a reluctance to buy into his methods over the long haul? Securing Lüthi’s services was something of a coup, given his long and storied history with Federer, and Aneke has admitted she and Rune were initially “a little starstruck” by the Swiss. Yet there was an undercurrent of scepticism in her appraisal of Lüthi’s desire to channel her son’s exuberant on-court persona.
“Holger is super energetic, he’s explosive in his tennis,” said Aneke. “He likes to play this way, he’s a passionate player, and for sure there are things where you should say, ‘Here you have to control or save your energy a little.’
“But you cannot take out the energy of Holger. You lose the explosiveness, you lose the net game, you lose a lot of things that are part Holger’s identity. So it’s really a fine balance in where it’s the ice, where it’s the fire.”
Given the evident strength of feeling within Rune’s core team about what does and doesn’t work for him, it seems highly questionable that a brains trust of super coaches is what he needs at this stage in his career. Ultimately, the instability within Rune’s coaching set-up is rooted in his split with Lars Christensen, the Dane who mentored him from the age of six but left the team last year following a fractious collaboration with Patrick Mouratoglou. As was evident in a statement released this week through IMG – with whom Rune has signed after Aneke stepped down as his press manager – Rune craves a return to the comfort of the familiar.
“After working with the same coach for 15 years, my entire tennis life, it is not easy to find the perfect match on the first try,” Rune wrote. “I have big ambitions and big goals, and I need people around me who have the same visions and who I can trust to achieve my goals.
“I need people who know me – who can be there all the time.”
If those are the criteria, renaissance rather than revolution would seem to be the order of the day. Christensen is currently working with another Dane, Clara Tauson, but Rune retains a warm regard for Mouratoglou, and the feeling is mutual. Carlsen, meanwhile, has known Rune since he was eight years old.
Whatever path the Dane chooses next, stability behind the scenes will be key if he is to remain in the slipstream of Sinner and Alcaraz. Set to appear alongside the pair at October’s 6 Kings Slam, a lucrative exhibition event in Riyadh that will also feature Djokovic, Nadal and Daniil Medvedev, Rune is currently the only player in the field not to have won a major. For that to change, the focus must return to process rather than personnel.