David Jordà: “I would like to reach as high as I can” | ATP Tour

David Jorda Sanchis

David Jordà: “I would like to reach as high as I can”

The Spaniard achieved his first ATP Tour victory in Estoril at the age of 29

April 05, 2024

David Jordà achieved his first ATP Tour victory this week at the age of 29.
By ATPTour.com/es Staff

At 29 years old, David Jordà achieved his first ATP Tour victory this week in Estoril. He did it after a career full of problems (up to four operations) and after a great demonstration of personal sacrifice, faith and persistence.

After his victory, Jordà sat down with ATPTour.com to assess what he had achieved and tell his story.

What does it mean for you to win your first ATP match at 29 years old?

The truth is that the feeling of winning my first ATP match in an ATP 250 at the age of 29 is a feeling of pride, of happiness, of thinking about all that suffering that we have gone through for years without having the possibility of competing, moments of being in the shadow, even not being on the circuit anymore and thinking that it would never arrive.

The truth is that persistence, work, perseverance, madness… that madness that was inside me to think that sooner or later my opportunity would come. I know that I would be there, that I would make it, even if the situation did not seem favorable. The feeling of winning the other day was one of pride.

In the end, all this is a beautiful story, but the truth is that this was the path that was written for me. I am very happy and enjoying it, like a second youth. For all these things to go well I also have to thank many people who were with me, especially in the bad moments: my coach Álex López Morón, my physical trainers at that time, José Canos, Ernest Baiget and my parents, who They are always quieter, but they are always there. If I had not been stubborn, if I had not believed, if I had not fought for this, it is a path that would have ended much sooner.

Many people would have stopped playing tennis sooner. As long as you see that your level is competitive, and objectively you see that you are there even if things don’t go well,… It’s very good to get my first ATP victory, it puts me on the radar of many people who now want to know my story. This is a small step and it has to go much further. I have to keep working, I have a long way to go. It is something that I have assumed and with great enthusiasm. This is a small victory that helps a lot in terms of confidence, in terms of seeing that you can compete every day with people you have been watching on TV.

Despite having been competing for a long time, what do you think is the reason for achieving your first ATP victory at almost 30 years old?

It is entirely due to the capacity for suffering. To the ability to work, to the resistance when things go wrong, to give yourself another chance. To fall and give yourself another chance, and lose and give yourself another chance.

Also to a change I made this year, in January. I went to train in Barcelona, ​​with a good structure, at the Barcelona Tennis Club. We are doing things very well. Every day is very good, I continue to learn a lot, I am in a very calm, very healthy, very tennis environment, which also helps me to be focused on a great club that gives me that peace of mind. I am a person who needs to be in a tennis club, with its members, with its people, to go in the morning and see that people go there to play tennis, pass them in the locker room and greet them. That environment gives me peace to go to train happy every day.

Do your goals change now?

My goals do not change, because my goal has always been to try to reach the Top 100. I always say that, without detracting from anything, I work to reach the Top 100. If you asked me if tomorrow I aim to finish 150th in the world, I would say that I have I have to sign that paper, I stop playing. I would like to reach as high as I can. What I work for and dream about is trying to reach the Top 100. My goals remain the same. My steps to follow now are the safest: continue playing Challengers, which is the level that my ranking allows me today. And keep training, we are doing very well.

For all the general public who did not know you, and know you now, what is your story?

I have been playing tennis for many years. I started as a child, like most of the kids on the circuit, at the Tarragona Tennis Club. At the age of 17, in one of the Spanish championships I finished runner-up, without ever having passed a round before. That’s when I realize that I have a good level, although very far from what the ATP circuit is.

That’s when I start to believe that I can try. I had a great childhood, with parents who let me play tennis, but the priority was studying. I passed the selectivity test and from the age of 18 is when I started training daily. Until that moment, I trained 3-4 days a week, in the afternoon, I even left school at noon to do an hour of training and then returned to school in the afternoon. Without a very professional structure. Until I am 18 years old, that is when I consider trying to play tennis at the Futures level, but without stopping studying. At 18 I passed the selectivity and started my degree in Business Administration and Management. While I was playing tennis, I remember that I went to train in the mornings from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And then I went to university.

I played my first year of Futures, from age 18 to 19. I made it to the top 1000. The physical problems began. There it is true that I did not stand out. There are many young players who start playing Futures and quickly rise in the ranking, reach 400 or 500 and have a lot of projection. I wasn’t one of these players either.

At 18-19 the injuries started, I had to have surgery on my right shoulder. I remember that I did the entire recovery, it took about 6-7 months to recover that shoulder and I perfectly remember the feeling of going to play the first tournament and looking at my coach and saying: ‘here is something that doesn’t work, I have the same pain. that I had before’. I actually played that game, I lost it, but the news was that I had to undergo surgery again.

I was gone almost a year, another year. At the end of it all, I didn’t compete for about 2 years and 3 months and during that time I was lucky enough to meet José Canós, who is one of my best friends. He is one of the people why I continue playing tennis today, because if it hadn’t been for him I would have taken a different path.

Those 2 years we were every day at 9 or 10 in the morning doing my physical preparation session and it was day after day. I kept thinking about being able to play again, I was still very young. I had the hope that when my shoulder was healthy, I would compete again. And so it was, after 2 years I was able to play again and after 2 years I decided to make a change in the subject of training: I decided to leave Tarragona, which had been my home all my life, with the coach of my entire life. , and I went to Barcelona to train.

Within a year, he was playing really, really well. In a Future in Jávea, in the second game of the match, I slipped on the court and had a shoulder dislocation, a serious injury where I really destroyed a large part of my shoulder: ligaments, capsule… that was a trigger. It was the third time that I had to undergo surgery, and there I was also practically out of competition for a year.

When I came back, it was really hard for me to have to play Futures previews, go back, not have points… Mentally I was exhausted and it led me to make the decision not to want to continue playing. I remember playing some tournaments in Tunisia with my head completely out, not wanting to be there. I came home and told my father that I needed to take some time, give myself a break, and that’s how it was: I returned to Tarragona, I stayed there for a couple of months. I spoke to my lifelong coach and he told me: ‘come on, let’s train together a little without any pressure, just come train for the sake of training and enjoy a little.’

I remember that we used to train on some good days, but there were many bad days because I didn’t really find the desire to do it. Months went by and I had a problem: I competed a little and I got pain in my wrist that didn’t allow me to play and at that moment, probably pushed a little by my father, very wisely, I looked for an alternative, some other plan B.

I had already finished my degree, which I did in four years, and there arose the opportunity to start working with Nastic de Tarragona, with the football club where I was working from 2018 to January 2024, almost five years. total. When the pandemic arrived, I was there all that time without playing and I had to have wrist surgery when I returned from the pandemic because I had pain that prevented me from playing. It was the fourth operation and everything was a bit the other way around: I wanted to try it, I always had this thorn of wanting to play but I don’t know if it was the end of the road.

A couple of years ago, after working there for a long time at Nastic, I decided to give myself one last chance. I placed 700 in the ranking, and that year I ended up at 27 years old winning my first Futues in Alcalá de Henares. I have always longed for something like this, after so many years playing Futures, having seen myself in thousands of tournaments and having the option to finally win one… The milestone of winning a Futures was already an achievement for me. By finishing the year so well, it made me decide to play much more the following season and I began to telework and play tournaments anywhere in the world, having a very long season where I played many weeks and ended up with my best ranking last year, 320.

Until very recently, he continued working on his city’s soccer team (Nastic) and combining it with tennis. How do you do that?

Yes, until recently I was still working on the soccer team in my city, in the city of Tarragona. Apart from being just another fan of the club, it was a great opportunity for me to be able to live work experience, learn what a company is, and touch what I had studied. It is a facet of me that interests me, I like many other things apart from tennis, although my fever for tennis comes above all else. It was a beautiful experience, an experience that also helped me to value the moments in tennis a lot.

I remember that I would go to the office and then in the afternoon I would train at the end of the day with my trainer and they were like my two hours of disconnection. I would look in the mirror after training and say: ‘I have spent my two good hours of training with good attitude, I had a good time.’ I understood that was what I had to look for. Now I really enjoy what I do. Combining tennis with work is impossible if you don’t have a company behind you, company leaders, bosses, colleagues who help you, who allow it, because the truth is that this doesn’t exist anywhere.

They were some hard times: sometimes there were game days when I played at 10 in the morning. I would get up and the first thing I would do was open the email, I would try to answer all the emails possible, even one day before a game they would call me and I would have to answer and I couldn’t focus 100% as I would have liked, but it was the way I could do what I wanted, the price I had to pay. You see what the real world is. Here in tennis you suffer a lot, there is a lot of pressure in the matches, you can smell all the pressure in the hallways before the matches.

This week, here at the ATP in Estoril, you realize that people have a lot at stake, but at the end of the day we are privileged, we are doing what we like, we live from sport. For me, a person who goes to the office, who is working 225 days a year to have vacations, to be able to travel, to be able to enjoy and start again another year… the truth is that this makes me value a lot the place where I am and it is I repeat a phrase a lot when I’m on the track.