Gomez, Andres

As a child, Andres Gomez took tennis lessons from the famous coach Harry Hopman . In 1978, he was first invited to the Ecuador national team for the South American group of the Davis Cup . The following year, Andres, who was going to go to college and study biology, at the last moment made a choice in favor of professional tennis and quickly became one of the 50 best tennis players in the world.

Already in 1980, Gomez won five champion titles in the Grand Prix doubles and reached the final two more times. In most cases, his partner was Chilean Hans Gildemeister , whose collaboration continued from that point throughout most of Gomez’s career. The following year, they won five tournaments together and lost twice in the final, but in just one year Gomez won seven titles and went to the final three more times. He also won his first Grand Prix singles tournament in Bordeaux . In 1982, he added two more singles titles to the trophy list, ending the year among the top 20 tennis players in the world. After that, he remained in the lists of the world tennis elite until 1990 , ending in the Top-20 each season with the exception of 1988 .

In 1983, Gomez, winning all six of his meetings with rivals from the national teams of the Caribbean islands, Canada and Brazil , led the Ecuadorian national team to the World group of the Davis Cup. At the individual level, he played four times in the finals of the Grand Prix tournaments in singles and won once. Coming to the end of the season in 12th place in the ranking , he took part in the ATP World Championship - the final tournament of the year for the strongest tennis players on the planet. There, he beat Elliot Telcher’s 14th racket in the first round, but in the quarterfinals he was stopped by rating leader Ivan Lendl .

For the next three years, Gomez won ten Grand Prix singles tournaments. Four more times he lost in the finals, and in grand slam tournaments he reached the quarterfinal four times. Each season he finished among the participants of the ATP World Championship, having shown his best result in the final tournament of 1985 , when he reached the semifinals after victories over Henri Leconte and Johan Crick before losing to Lendle again. He finished 1984 in fifth place in the ranking and 1986 on the tenth. In the doubles, he won over this time 11 titles, of which seven were in 1986. His main partner remained Gildemeister, but his main title in 1986 - at the US Open - Gomez won with Yugoslav Slobodan Zyvoinovich , with whom he made a pair at the last moment before the start of the tournament ^[3] . In September, he headed the ATP rating in doubles and was ranked first, with breaks of 10 weeks until mid-January 1987 ^[4] . At the end of 1986, he only participated in the APR World Championship in doubles (with Gildemeister), but they managed to win only one match in the group stage, in which their opponents were Stefan Edberg and Anders Yarried , and did not qualify for the semi-finals. In the Davis Cup, Gomez helped the Ecuador team to stay in the World Group twice in a row, first winning all three of their meetings in the playoff match against the New Zealanders in 1984, and then also beating out rivals from the Argentina national team . In 1986, he brought the team two points against the US team , beating Jimmy Arias and Aaron Crickstein , but the Ecuadorians ended up losing 3-2, and in the playoffs they were completely defeated by the West German team .

Although Gomez’s success was no longer so frequent after 1986, over the next six years he won seven tournaments in singles and nine in pairs, including at the 1988 French Open together with Emilio Sanchez . Fattered and starting to lose interest in the game, he broke up in 1989 with Colin Nunez, who had been training him for many years, and began working with Pato Rodriguez. The new coach was able to stir up Gomez, who at the beginning of 1990 drove for the first time in his career to the Australian Open , and then unexpectedly for himself reached the final at a tournament in Philadelphia , played on artificial turf courts ^[5] . With the start of the ground season, he won two tournaments in Barcelona and Madrid, playing also in the semifinals of the Italian Open and rising during this time in the ranking to seventh place. At the 1990 French Open, Gomez beat Thomas Muster , his recent abuser in Rome in the semifinals, and 20-year-old Andre Agassi in the final. In the final match, when the score was 1-1 in sets, realizing that he would not survive the five-set match, the already tired Ecuadorian imposed a tactical game on his young opponent, in the third set he won three games in the Agassi serve and added another one in the fourth, which was enough for him for final victory ^[6] . At 30 years and 3 months, Gomez became the oldest winner of the French Open since 1972, when Andres Himeno won it at 34. He also became the first South American since 1977 to win this tournament. ^[3] After this success, he rose to the highest level in his singles career, becoming the fourth racket of the world.

Andres Gomez continued appearances in individual tennis tournaments until the spring of 1993 , winning 21 titles in singles and 33 titles in doubles (18 of them with Gildemeister). After that, however, he also played for the Ecuador national team in the Davis Cup until 2000, inclusive. So far, he holds the national team record for the number of victories in pairs (20). He is also the oldest player in the history of the Ecuadorian team, having played his last match at the age of 40 years and 39 days ^[7] . In spite of the fact that Andres Gomez basically remained the player of the second ten of the world ranking in singles, he had a number of victories over the leaders of the rankings during his speeches. These include victories in 1989 at the tournament in Barcelona over Ivan Lendl - the current first racket of the world - and in 1987 in New York over Boris Becker , who at the time was in second place in the ranking.

Singles (1 + 0)

Victory

Doubles rank (2 + 0)

Victory

Singles (21)

Doubles (33)

Singles

Male doubles

• Profile on ATP website (eng.)

• Profile on the Davis Cup website (eng.)