Struggles and Successes

Zizou Bergs's secret to success: Less cramping, more winning

Less cramping, more winning. That has been a simple, yet effective formula for Belgian No. 1 Zizou Bergs.

The 25-year-old, who will face 29th seed Matteo Berrettini on Monday in the third round of the Miami Open presented by Itau, cracked the Top 100 in the PIF ATP Rankings last May. Less than a year later, he is inside the Top 50 of the PIF ATP Live Rankings and shows no intention of slowing his ascent, as evidenced by his second-round upset of Andrey Rublev.

A big part of his surge has been his health. The Bergs team last year solved a longstanding battle with cramping that has hindered Zizou since he was 15, with the first incident coming at the Under-16 European Championships.

“In the middle of the second set, I started to cramp real bad, and then obviously I didn't make it into the third set,” Bergs told ATPTour.com. “Even after the match, I was cramping for two or three hours in the locker room. And since that moment on, it was always there until last year. Almost every three-set match, even sometimes two sets — it's not always been big cramps, but definitely small cramps that could lead up to big cramps. That was pretty traumatic at a certain point.”

The worst experience Bergs went through came when Belgium played Davis Cup in Paraguay against Bolivia in 2021. He fell to Murkel Dellien in three sets, losing the decider 2-6.

“I started to cramp real bad in the third set, and I was cramping so hard that they sent me to the hospital,” Bergs said. “But even in the car, I was laying down on this bed, but just cramping all the time. It was so painful, unbelievable.”

The most difficult part of this problem was that Bergs nor his team knew where it came from, no matter how hard they worked to solve it.

“At some point it's really tough because you know you have to win in two sets, otherwise you don't make it. And at a certain point, tennis players start to know, especially when it was real bad. But it also shaped something like mental toughness,” Bergs said. “It taught me how to approach from the first point on and make sure I don't let go. Also in those moments, I have to say, the beginning was easier than at the end, when I was cramping, to still find solutions while cramping.

“[I was] hitting all these big forehands, all the big shots to make sure you don't have to run and stuff. But at a certain point, it was just too much of a trauma that I didn't manage well.”

 

It sounds simple, but the key to the solution turned out to be hydration.

“We did a lot of stuff, and probably it's a very complex puzzle, and step by step in all these years, we were fixing small things,” Bergs said. “Maybe at the end of the day, it's just fixing all these small things that made the difference. But at the end, what made the biggest difference was just the hydration, and probably all the other things that we did in the meanwhile made sure that I wasn't cramping anymore.

“Maybe if I only fixed the hydration, it was maybe not enough yet. So it's a very complex puzzle of the cramping.”

In just his second tournament of the season, the ASB Classic in Auckland, Bergs qualified and advanced to his first ATP Tour final, losing to Gael Monfils. The Belgian won four three-setters that week to set the tone for what has been a breakout year. Bergs also made the Marseille semi-finals and is now into the third round of an ATP Masters 1000 event for the first time.

It is an exciting moment for Bergs, who has shown a propensity to shine in the big moments and embrace special atmospheres.

“The thing for me is sometimes I'm curious where my limits are, because if you have a great junior career, or a fast path, then you know you have the ability to become real big [in terms of] the confidence you're building up," Bergs said. "The faster you get learning, the faster trajectory you have, and I missed all of that. Even with this cramp issue, I managed to be number 12 in the juniors, but what if it wasn't there? Would I maybe be five or one in the world? This makes me curious for myself to see where I can go in my career."