Fatigued De Minaur calls for shorter season after French Open loss - ESPN

A fatigued Alex De Minaur crashed out of the French Open on Thursday and called for the tennis calendar to be shortened, warning that a failure to take action soon could result in players burning out physically and mentally.

The season kicked off with the United Cup mixed team tournament in December, 33 days after the Davis Cup Finals ended in Spain, and the grueling nature of the circuit has come under a harsh spotlight in recent years.

«No one's got a solution,» De Minaur said after his 2-6, 2-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 second-round defeat by Alexander Bublik.

«But the solution is simple: You shorten the schedule, right? What's not normal is that for the last three, four years I've had two days off after the Davis Cup and I've gone straight into preseason, straight into the new season again.

»Once you start, you don't finish until Nov. 24. So it's never ending. The way it's structured… I had to deal with that. I'm still dealing with that right now.

«The solution is you shorten [the tour], because what's going to happen is players' careers are going to get shorter and shorter because they're just going to burn out mentally. There's just too much tennis.»

Twice French Open finalist Casper Ruud said after his shock exit on Wednesday that the ATP's ranking system was like a «rat race» and that players felt compelled to compete in the men's tour's mandatory events even if they were carrying injuries.

The seventh seed, who lost to unseeded Nuno Borges, said he had been struggling with knee pain.

Asked whether the tennis calendar made it difficult to take time off and fully heal an injury, the 26-year-old Norwegian said players' rankings would take a hit if they skipped mandatory events.

«Well, it's like a rat race when it comes to the