Dominic Thiem got thrashed by Novak Djokovic in their semifinal match in Paris on Friday, but even with that loss Thiem will enter the men’s top ten next week. Photograph by ERIC FEFERBERG / AFP / Getty

These days, men’s tennis waits and waits—and I am not talking about the countless rain delays at the Drenched Open the past two weeks in Paris. The men’s game waits wistfully for the Golden Age to finally tarnish, and for the oldest two of the Big Four—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray—to call it quits. (Thirty-four-year-old Federer, with an injured back, didn’t play a point at Roland Garros, for the first time since 1999, and thirty-year-old Nadal, with an injured wrist, didn’t make it to the second week, for the first time since his very first appearance there, in 2005.) And it waits, with the leaps of faith and loss of heart common to the passionate, for the next cohort of potentially great champions. Or even one.

There was, as far back as 2009—when, as a twenty-year-old, he defeated Fed in the U.S. Open final—the tall, commanding, and disarmingly warm Argentine Juan Martín del Potro. It would turn out his wrists were made of glass. How about Grigor Dimitrov? Little Fed, he got called, and—when, at Wimbledon two years ago, having just turned twenty-three, he beat Murray, the defending champion, in straight sets, made it into the semis (where he lost to the eventual winner, Djokovic), and cracked the top ten—he looked for all the world like the next best thing. He wasn’t. Did he get confused about the best strategy? Did he lack the necessary work ethic? Whatever it was, he is currently ranked No. 36. Milos Raonic, age twenty-five, got to No. 4 last year, and is still in the top ten, but he always seems to be hobbled by some injury or another—something his new coach, John McEnroe, can’t fix. Among today’s very youngest on the A.T.P. tour, there is the hard-hitting but mercurial Australian Nick Kyrgios (twenty-one); Borna Ćorić, a.k.a. Baby Djokovic (nineteen), the mover and defender from Croatia; a couple of promising (sigh) American eighteen-year-olds, Taylor Fritz and Francis Tiafoe; and the gangly but immensely gifted Russian-born German Sascha Zverev (nineteen).

And then there is the twenty-two-year-old Austrian Dominic Thiem. The wait for him would seem to be over, at least if the surface is clay. Djokovic thrashed Thiem in straight sets in their semifinal match in Paris on Friday, but then most everyone loses to Djokovic. Even with that loss, Thiem will, after his deep run at the French Open, enter the men’s top ten next week. And his play in Paris was no fluke. He won two tournaments in February, in Buenos Aires and Acapulco. He’s beaten Nadal and Federer this year on clay. He won the French Open warmup tourney in Nice last month. In the so-called Race to London rankings, which count points earned at tournaments this year, he will enter the top five.

Like Taylor Fritz and Sascha Zverev, Thiem was born to a tennis family: both his mother and father are coaches. But one of the keys to Thiem’s success was the family’s decision, when Dominic was eleven, to place his development in the hands of the legendary Viennese coach Gunter Bresnik. Bresnik coached Boris Becker back in the day and, more recently, has brought Ernests Gulbis’s game back around. What he did with the young Thiem was radical: he coaxed him to abandon a two-handed backhand and develop (in the twenty-first century!) a one-handed topspin drive. He got him more muscled up and fit. And he forced him to abandon a defensive, “backboard” approach to the game and get aggressive from the baseline—hitting everything hard and heavy with topspin, taking charge, creating points, going for winners. By his seventeenth birthday, he was an outstanding junior, especially on clay, reaching the French Open boys’ final in 2011.

Thiem’s is an artful and thrilling game to watch. He draws his racquet way back on both wings, and brings it forward with blurry speed. His torqued (forehand) and extended (backhand) follow-throughs lift his six-foot-one, hundred-and-eighty-pound frame a foot or so off the ground, balletically. He moves well, and thinks well—often, it seems, two or three shots ahead. His serve, at least for now, is not going to earn him a lot of cheap points, but it’s solid and, when he employs topspin, tricky. And his mental strength—the calm he possesses, and the focus—is quite remarkable for his age. Evidence of this: the percentage of tiebreaks he has won this year is among the highest on the men’s tour.

His biggest challenges? His game demands a lot of his body, and the better you play, the more you play. Will he, like too many other promising players before him, break down? Thiem’s is also a game—those big cuts and long baseline rallies—not well suited to grass, which the tour moves to after Paris. He has not fared well at Wimbledon the past two years. But he is very young; he has it in him to learn and grow. That’s what men’s tennis is waiting for.