Alex de Minaur Misses Turin by 64 Points, Waits as Alternate

Sixty-four points. That's the whole distance between Alex de Minaur's season and a place in the ATP Finals. The Australian finished ninth in the Race to Turin with 3,170 points, just behind Rafael Jódar's 3,234 for the eighth and final spot, and he'll spend the week in Italy as the first alternate — close enough to need his rackets strung, far enough to need someone else's bad luck.

The ticket was decided on November 6 in Paris, in a match de Minaur wasn't playing. Taylor Fritz held two match points in his quarterfinal against Carlos Alcaraz and lost anyway, 6-7, 7-5, 6-3. Fritz's defeat locked Jódar into the final place and left de Minaur ninth and Fritz tenth, 184 points short, as the second alternate.

It stings more because de Minaur knows this stage. He was a semifinalist at the ATP Finals in 2025, Australia's No. 1, and he reached a career-high ranking of No. 5 in July before settling at No. 9 this week. Eleven career titles say he's not a passenger at this level. The race simply ran out of weeks.

The alternate's week is a strange professional purgatory. He practices on site, sits through the media obligations, and watches the round robin knowing that a single withdrawal before or during the group stage puts him into the most lucrative event of the year. Players have stepped in mid-week before and made real money and real points doing it.

The math of his near-miss is worth stating plainly. One more win at the right tournament — one Masters quarterfinal turned semifinal, one 500-level Sunday — and the 64 points disappear. At the top of the race, the margins aren't abstract. They're a single afternoon.

There's a sharper edge to it, too. The player who took the last seat, Jódar, beat de Minaur head-to-head in Madrid this spring, losing only four games in the match. The race is a season-long accumulation, but in the end it bent on afternoons like that one — a direct rival taking direct points off him. Sixty-four points is roughly one good week. De Minaur can point to the exact week it got away.

So he'll do the alternate's full week: practice on the show courts, stay in the official hotel, keep his body ready for a call that may never come. Taylor Fritz waits behind him as the second alternate. If the field stays intact, both men fly home with nothing. If it cracks, de Minaur is first through the door.

De Minaur will prepare like he's playing, because he might be. If the call comes, Turin gets a man who's already proven he belongs in its semifinals. If it doesn't, 64 points is the number he'll carry into January.