US Open Re-Lived: Marat Safin 2000

The Tennis Podcast

David Law

Sports, Wimbledon, Sports & Recreation, Tennis

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2021

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“In a performance so casual it was chilling, Safin announced himself as the game's next big thing by dismantling the best player ever.”

Those were the words of S.L. Price in Sports Illustrated after 20-year-old Marat Safin beat Pete Sampras to win the US Open in 2000, a story we tell on this edition of Tennis Re-Lived.

Why did Chris Clarey think Safin would be a future World No.1 from the moment he saw him? What did Yevgeny Kafelnikov think of Safin when they first met at the Davis Cup? Why was Safin the ideal guy to be front and centre of the ATP’s ‘New Balls Please’ campaign? And how did a coaching change in April 2000 help Safin to rediscover his best form after a glut of bad results at the start of the year?

Turning to New York, how much of a contender was Safin going into the tournament? In what way did he struggle in the opening rounds? And why did he need to borrow some socks from Jeff Tarango?

We hear from Mary Carillo in the commentary box about what made Safin’s performance in the final so special and Paul Annacone in the coaching box about the moment he knew Sampras had a problem.

Afterwards, we reflect on what happened next in Safin’s career, with Marat himself explaining the pressure he felt to win a second Grand Slam title, which eventually came in Australia in 2005, and the injuries which ended his career.

Should Safin be considered an underachiever? And in what way did he leave his mark on the sport beyond his results?

The Tennis Podcast is presented by Catherine Whitaker and David Law, and features Matt Roberts. It is produced weekly year-round, and daily during the Grand Slam tournaments. It is crowdfunded by listeners each December.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, this is Billie Jean King. This is Mary and Bartorri.
0:03.1	I'm Matt's Vylander. This is Mary Carillo. This is Pam Shriver.
0:06.4	I'm Stan Rauinka. I'm Lighten Hutt. This is Yannick Noah and you're listening to the tennis
0:10.9	podcast.
0:22.1	Well hello folks, we are back. We are back a little bit sooner than you might have expected us to be
0:27.9	back. Who knew that was possible? Because it is that time again, it is tennis relived time.
0:34.8	We have relived Australian opens. We have relived French opens. We have relived Wimbledons.
0:40.9	And now it's time to relive. Two particular US opens. This episode will take us back in time
0:49.6	to the year 2000. Do you remember when the year 2000 David, and I know the answer to this question
0:55.3	is very definitely yes. It felt like a sort of futuristic time, a space age time, and now it feels
1:02.8	like ages ago. Yes, yes. It's when we started using the word millennium. I'd never used that before
1:08.7	apart from when talking about Star Wars. When did that happen? It's like all the pandemic
1:16.4	lingo that we now just rolls off our tongue. When did Y2K become just common parlance?
1:23.7	Well, I do remember it coming across my radar and we started to look at all my technology
1:30.8	devices and thinking, so these things are just going to stop working immediately.
1:36.1	What was your level of Y2K fear David? Pretty heightened. Yeah, sounds pretty heightened.
1:43.2	Yeah, I would say so. I just assumed that I believed every word of it.
1:48.0	Would you have taken a flight and been in the air because people were threatening for planes to
1:53.6	just cease to function and fall out of the sky at midnight on January the first 2000? I'd probably
2:00.4	left it a few hours, yeah. Well, spoiler alert folks, everything was completely fine.
2:08.6	What was your level of paranoia Catherine? Oh, I just found it all quite exciting. I didn't think
2:14.8	the world was going to end. I don't think because when you're that age, what would I have been 13?
	...

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