Ranking Reaction: With fourth title, red-hot Andrey Rublev up to No. 8

Andrey Rublev’s climb up the ATP rankings continued this week, as he rose from No. 10 to a new career-high of No. 8 after capturing his fourth ATP title of the year in St. Petersburg.

And he has no plans of slowing down.

“I am proud and I am happy with the way I am performing,” Rublev told ATPTour.com. “I try not to think about it. I try to focus on the things I still need to improve, because there are so many things I can improve—and that I have to improve—if I want to be at the same level or even better.”

Rublev’s first big push up the rankings in 2020 came in January. The 22-year-old got off to a blistering start to the season, winning his first 11 matches, earning back-to-back titles at Doha and Adelaide, and reaching the fourth round of the Australian Open. Having started the year at No. 23, those four weeks propelled him to No. 15.

He’s taken his game to another level since the restart, winning 19 of his last 22 matches over the last seven weeks to reach back-to-back Grand Slam quarterfinals at the US Open and Roland Garros, and pick up the two biggest titles of his career: at 500-level events in Hamburg on clay (the week before Roland Garros) and in St. Petersburg on indoor hard (the week after Roland Garros).

The Russian is also the leading contender for one of the last two spots at the ATP Finals.

“Even if I don’t make it, the season was really good for me anyway," he said. "If I make it, it’s really good news.”

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Alexander Zverev, who won the 250-level event in Cologne, Germany this past week, stayed at No. 7 on the new rankings, but the other player who lifted an ATP trophy on the weekend—Laslo Djere, who won the 250-level clay-court event in Sardinia—surged from No. 74 to No. 53 on Monday.

The Serbian is a former Top 30 player, reaching as high as No. 27 last June, but he plummeted down the rankings this February after withdrawing from Rio de Janeiro due to an abdominal injury; he had won the 500-level event the year before. With those points coming off, he fell from No. 36 to No. 67. He went as low as No. 81 going into the US Open, but he’s now on the verge of returning to the Top 50.

The man Djere beat in the final in Sardinia, Marco Cecchinato, returned to the Top 100 for the first time since February, rising from No. 103 to No. 77. The Italian reached as high as No. 16 in 2019.

And a bit further down the rankings, two of the three teenagers in the Top 200 made big pushes towards their Top 100 debuts, with 18-year-old Italian Lorenzo Musetti rising from No. 143 to No. 123 after reaching his first ATP semifinal in Sardinia, and 17-year-old Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz rising from No. 158 to No. 136 after winning a tournament in Alicante, Spain, his second Challenger title in two weeks.

The only other teenager in the Top 200 is 19-year-old Italian Jannik Sinner, who’s currently No. 46.

With no WTA events this past week, there were no notable changes on the women's rankings.