How Alex de Minaur and Katie Boulter are making crowds at the Australian Open swoon
Alex de Minaur and Katie Boulter are shacked up in an Airbnb near the buzzy cafe where their courtship ignited in Melbourne five years ago – and both have since helped each other turbocharge their careers.
Alex de Minaur and Katie Boulter are shacked up in an Airbnb at South Yarra. Near the buzzy eatery where their courtship ignited: the SOS Cafe on Toorak Road. They’ll share a courtesy car to the Australian Open on Thursday while crediting the same burning, anchoring, powerful force for the best phases of their lives and careers. Love, actually. Their relationship is sincere, encouraging and impossibly cute.
They met five years ago when Boulter, a cheerful, radiant, outgoing English rose, approached the quiet, serious and shy de Minaur at 6am in the foyer of a Melbourne tournament hotel. She’d heard from mutual friends he was a good bloke. Decent and humble. Boulter’s grandfather was one of her favourite people in this world, because he had a good heart, and she thought if she ever found a fella half as good, he’d be a keeper.
They grabbed a quick cuppa that first morning. All went well. She suspected she’d found the one. De Minaur thought she was a joy to be around. They had a more formal coffee date at SOS Cafe. When Covid hit and everyone was locked up, they spoke nearly daily on FaceTime. When the tour resumed, they’d go to hotel breakfast bars at different times during tournaments so nobody suspected their relationship. In March 2021, they revealed they were an item, which everyone sort of knew, and they’ve been together ever since.
Boulter’s whopper of an engagement ring is flashing around the corridors of Melbourne Park after their December engagement. “I’m very happy that happened,” de Minaur said after his first-round win over Botic van de Zandschulp on Tuesday night. “In saying that, she’s playing right now, so I better get out there and watch.”
Impossibly cute. After his victorious start at Melbourne Park, de Minaur was on an exercise bike in the players’ gym when Boulter’s clash against Rebecca Marino came on TV. She held serve, he pumped his fist, jumped off his bike and watched the final stages of her three-set win on Kia Arena.
“Having Alex there, he’s my support system,” Boulter says. “He’s someone who has helped me through the rough moments and the good moments. He kind of leads me, I would say. He’s shown what an incredible tennis player he is, and he’s ranked (in) top 10 in the world, and has been there for a whole year, which is not an easy thing to do. I’ve learnt so many different ways of becoming a better tennis player. Having him come out and support means pretty much everything to me. Having the extra positivity from my bench makes the difference.”
De Minaur was the world No.26 when he met Boulter. She was No.365. Now they’re No.8 and No.25, shooting up the rankings like a couple of giddy Cupid’s arrows. They’re outside chances to win the Open, actually. He’s a more relaxed character since Boulter entered his life – “a sense of peace” – is how he describes it. He never used to drink but she doesn’t mind the occasional glass of wine; he’s started joining her when the time is right. He used to celebrate his wins with a pizza. Then he started winning so often he was eating too much pizza. It’s disappeared from their menu.
Happy future wife, happy life down at South Yarra. It’s a simple existence. They train at Melbourne Park on their days off. Return to their Airbnb. Go back to Melbourne Park for their matches. They’re courtside for each other unless there’s a clash. When the Australian summer is over, they’ll return to their base at Wimbledon, the London suburb they call home.
Boulter’s parents and her training facility are there. De Minaur’s parents live at Alicante in Spain, where the family moved so he could pursue his tennis dream from the age of 12. Majors are their favourite tournaments, when the men’s and women’s tours combine, allowing the booking of cosy Airbnbs. Once, when de Minaur was in the final of the Mexico Open and Boulter was in a decider at San Diego on the same night, he joked he would win and then jet to the US to be courtside in time for her triumph. He was good to his word, and she won.
Zero excuses
What makes de Minaur tick? The constant desire for self-improvement. If you had a dollar for every time de Minaur has talked about becoming “the best version of myself”, you’d have a lot of dollars. He went through an arduous off-season fitness regimen to bulk up a bit and recover from last year’s hip injury. He’s all-in, all the time, and makes zero excuses.
Says Davis Cup captain Lleyton Hewitt: “I’m just so happy for Alex to be back playing like he wants to play again. Only probably his close-knit team know exactly what he’s been dealing with and how frustrating that’s been. He still kept showing up and giving 100 per cent and not making excuses. Like he always says, it’s about embracing this month of the year and enjoying all these the moments.
Lifelong coach
De Minaur’s coach is Spanish mystery man Adolfo Gutierrez, hiding behind sunglasses during matches and doing everything he can to avoid attention. Gutierrez has been by De Minaur’s side since their first lesson at Alicante, when the Australian was eight years old and could barely see over the net. “It’s been a long journey alongside a boy who loved tennis,” Gutierrez says. “Above all, he loved competing. If I had to define it in some way, let’s say he had an amazing journey, where the dreams we had always imagined have come true. The, ‘Imagine if one day we play …’ has become a reality and much more. When he needs it, he knows I’m here. I’d like to define myself as a huge support in his life. I’m not his father but I’ll always be there when he needs me.”
When Gutierrez won an ATP coaching award last year, he said: “Alex is a calm guy who likes routine. Maybe he’s a little disorganised, although Katie is working on that. We’ve always believed he could be successful. It was a question of whether Alex would realise. It’s the confidence of knowing Alex could do it. We’ve never given in and we’ve continued every day with the hope and excitement in our minds. We’ve worked hard for that goal but we’re never happy and we’ll keep working more if necessary to keep climbing as many places as possible. We want to go further and further in the grand slams.”
Fitness is paramount
De Minaur’s affection for playing at home is heartfelt. “When you do end up being a washed-up old man, these are the moments you miss, playing in front of your home crowd like this,” Hewitt said at the United Cup. “Alex has got as good a shot as anyone of obviously going deep at the Australian Open. First things first. You’ve got to take care of business and hopefully find a way to navigate your way into the second week of the slam … and then anything can happen.”
Fitness and physicality are paramount to de Minaur. He’s no weakling but has always struggled to match the power of the big dogs on tour. “It’s been a process, my whole journey, life, career, getting stronger,” he says. “That (gaining strength) has always been the goal without losing the cardio or the fitness aspect to it. This year we’re working even harder. We finished the pre-season, finished Davis Cup, and then some people take some holidays or some time off at the end of the year, but I wanted to get straight back to work because there’s not a lot of time to work on yourself. It was very important to look at myself and say, ‘Okay, these are the areas we need to improve off the court and on the court’. And then get to work. The motivation has never been higher.”
Boulter heard the voice of de Minaur’s mum, Esther, in the crowd before she saw her fiancee courtside on Tuesday evening. When de Minaur arrived, he kept pointing at his temple, encouraging her to think her way through. Boulter and Esther text virtually every day.
Boulter is receiving enormous crowd support at the Open because she’s de Minaur’s missus-to-be, of course, but also because she really is a cheerful, radiant, outgoing English rose. Australia’s female players are yet to fill the gaping void left by Ash Barty’s retirement and Boulter has become a de facto darling of the masses.
“I don’t really have too many words for it,” she says. “It’s way better than I expected. I felt so much love out there. The Aussie crowds are pretty incredible. They’re a little bit more rowdy than a lot of crowds and I enjoyed every minute. They picked me up loads. The shouting from the stands makes all the difference sometimes for me, and yeah, it was really nice to feel like everyone was with me, playing against her, rather than the opposite, which no one ever really wants.”
Train hard, play harder, open a bottle of wine every once in a while. On the de Minaur traits she admires, Boulter says: “Definitely the small habits, you know. Nothing really massive comes to mind this exact second because my brain is a little bit fried from the match. But there’s always tiny little habits and things that you pick up and you see. Even watching him on the tennis court, we are very different, we don’t play the same way, but there are certain things that I see his brain working around.”
De Minaur was a defence-oriented baseliner before Boulter came along. Now he’s more aggressive. She was a nearly reckless aggressor before de Minaur shouted the coffees at SOS Cafe. Now she scrambles like him. “When he’s manoeuvring someone around the court and it’s very tactical, I’ve not always been that kind of player. For me to actually see that, I start thinking to myself, ‘Why am I not doing that? Why am I not trying different things?’ Even though I can hit the bigger shots and go after them, and that’s always going to be my power play, I think seeing things like that and the way he operates, really it’s the small things I can learn from him and what he does in the big moments. That’s really the next step for me. Even talking to him about that is fascinating.”
The 22nd-seeded Boulter plays Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Thursday. At 1.30pm, de Minaur faces American qualifier Tristan Boyer, whose father had to evacuate his house in the LA fires. De Minaur has always worked indefatigably and competed feverishly but if you want to know the biggest reason for his rise … it’s Boulter.
“There’s always going to be pressure,” de Minaur says of trying to become Australia’s first male Open champion since Mark Edmondson in 1976. “Ultimately, as I’ve said many times, no one is going to put more pressure on myself than myself … but ultimately, I go in every day with a mindset of focusing on trying to bring out the best version of myself.”
Another dollar!
“But we know how tennis is. You can have some good days and you can have some bad days. If I have my bad day, I’m going to compete and fight till the end. I know that the crowd is going to have my back.
“It’s perspective. It’s what way you choose to look at pressure.”
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