The 23-year-old from Snarøya therefore ended the 2022 season on clay with a title. He managed to defend his title from last year when he rose to the top of the Swiss Open in Gstaad last week.

He was then supposed to continue his journey to Austria, but chose to withdraw due to shoulder pain. Ruud says he started feeling pain towards the end of the tournament in Gstaad.

– Basics are not a problem. It’s more the service. I started feeling it a bit towards the end of last week. It’s an important and exciting trip with big tournaments in the United States and Canada now, so we thought it best to rest a bit in terms of service, he told TV 2.

Now he is looking forward to spending a few days back home in Norway. There hasn’t been too many in 2022. Now the focus will be on a few good practice days in Oslo and getting his arm in shape so he can hit more serves again. 200 kilometers per hour when he travels to Canada next week.

– It is nothing serious. We know him and know that I must rest. But I can train completely otherwise, says Ruud, and adds:

– But not every blow that comes over the head is what the body is made for. It’s an overload that makes him tighten up a bit, Ruud says as he touches his shoulder and demonstrates the movement of a serve.

The fact that he is not playing in Kitbühel this week, and that he smoked in his debut game at Båstad two weeks ago, means that Ruud loses points in the standings. As he won both tournaments in addition to Gstaad last week, he had 750 points to defend these weeks.

The fact that he’s now losing a lot of those points doesn’t worry him much.

– It’s not a crisis. You should always try to think you should be chasing more points than defending everything all the time. Some weeks you do better than the previous year, and others not so well. But I think most players mostly look at the race leaderboard versus the weekly leaderboard. The most important thing is how you end the year, and I’m good at that, he said smiling.