Carlos Alcaraz tried to calm the noise around his wrist injury with a simple message on Instagram: he is on the right path. The problem for the Spanish star is that the pictures and videos he posted after missing the Canadian Open did not silence the bigger question hanging over his season — whether he will be fit in time for the US Open.
Alcaraz injured his wrist at the Barcelona Open in April and has already missed Roland Garros and Wimbledon. He was also left off the entry list for the Canadian Open, the event many had expected to be his comeback. Instead, his latest update showed him training, a sign of progress that still fell short of certainty for a player who has already collected seven Grand Slams by 23 years of age.
Boris Becker captured that caution bluntly. “Nice to see him hit a little but still far off I am afraid…,” he said after the post, echoing what many observers now think: that Alcaraz is nowhere near match fitness. The contrast between the player’s upbeat caption and the outside view matters because his recovery has moved beyond routine rehab and into a race against the calendar.
The concern is not abstract. The Canadian Open was supposed to be the place where Alcaraz returned, but instead it became another marker of how long the wrist problem has kept him out. That delay has revived memories of Dominic Thiem, who suffered a wrist injury at the 2021 Mallorca Open and missed an initial 10 months of action, and Juan Martin del Potro, whose own wrist problems after the 2009 US Open triump changed the shape of his career.
That is why the latest Instagram post landed with so much weight. It shows movement, but not resolution. Some believe Alcaraz may need to sit out the rest of the season and return for the Australian Open next year, a view that would turn this from a short absence into a much larger lost stretch. For now, the only thing his update settles is that he is working again; it does not answer the question everyone is asking about the US Open.
