Alex Molcan

Alex Molcan comes from Prešov in eastern Slovakia, where he took up the game at five and turned pro in 2015. The apprenticeship ran long. Wrist surgery and a torn abdominal muscle erased his stretch from October 2017 to April 2018, and he entered 2021 at ATP No. 313, still without a tour-level main draw to his name.

The game is left-handed attrition — two-handed backhand, deep rally tolerance, a serve that starts points rather than ends them, as evidenced by a career 3.7 percent ace rate. Rafael Nadal was the boyhood idol, and the retrieving pays best on slow courts, so it is no accident all three of his ATP finals came on clay; grass, rated nearly 500 points below his clay mark on The Drop Shot's surface scale, stays the outlier.

The breakout came at Belgrade in 2021, where he qualified and ran to the final before losing to Novak Djokovic. Runner-up finishes followed in 2022 at Marrakech — where he beat then-No. 9 Felix Auger-Aliassime — and Lyon, to David Goffin and Cameron Norrie in turn. Djokovic's former coach Marián Vajda signed on in May 2022, and Molcan touched his career-high ATP ranking of No. 50 in January 2023, but the partnership ended that September and the slide ran all the way to No. 282 by July 2025.

As of July 2026 the rebuild is measurable: the 28-year-old opened the season at ATP No. 202 and sits at No. 81, his peak of the year, at 9-5 with semifinals at the BMW Open — where he beat then-No. 11 Alexander Bublik — and Umag, past Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, plus a second round at Wimbledon. He opens Kitzbühel against Sebastian Ofner on July 21 with the serve carrying its share: 81 percent of service games held in 2026, against a 77 percent career rate.