Where Stan Wawrinka’s 2014 Australian Open Title Ranks Among Past Major Upsets

By
at Internationaled.org

Published: January 5, 2015

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As tennis prepares for the 2015 Australian Open, Stanislas Wawrinka will look to defend his 2014 title Down Under. Last year’s championship road to the title included victories over three-time defending champion Novak Djokovic and No. 1-ranked Rafael Nadal.

Wawrinka’s performance seems to rank as one of the great upsets in grand slam competition, but just how high does it rank compared to past one-time major winners?

We are going to crunch a few numbers to determine how unlikely and impressive this upset was. We will choose all 25 players of the Open era who won only one major title. There is even a range within these players, some who were career contenders for majors and others who seized one great moment and perhaps proved to be flukes.

So, we are not going to consider a future star’s first major, players like 1985 Boris Becker, 1997 Gustavo Kuerten and 2005 Rafael Nadal. They were young and largely unknown when they won their first majors, but more major wins and subsequent accomplishments merely proved that this was the beginning of their championship runs. It’s less of an upset in retrospect.

A player’s seeding also matters. It’s an indicator of how that player was playing for the calendar year leading up to that major. The lower the player’s seed, the less likely he was favored to win the title.

We also need to weigh the difficulty of the player’s journey to the final. Wawrinka defeated the top two players in the world last year on his way to the title. Our system will credit players for directly defeating the best players and not exclusively relying on bracket breaks or upsets to help them to a title.

 

Calculating the Champion’s Degree of Competition

It is more impressive to defeat top players on the road to a title. We will give points for each player the champion defeated that was seeded in the top 1...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Tennis

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