Every Grand Slam event has its own unique history and we have reviewed the most successful players in the Australian Open men’s singles tournament.
Grand Slam tournaments are the most coveted by the stars of tennis and the Australian Open offers players their first opportunity to land one of the sport’s great prizes each year.
Played at Melbourne Park on hard courts since 1988, the most successful men’s singles players of the Open Era, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Pete Sampras, have all lifted the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup.
Djokovic goes into the 2020 event, which begins on January 20, as the defending champion after his convincing victory over Nadal in the 2019 final.
The Serbian’s triumph brought an end to two consecutive years of Federer coming out on top at the tournament.
Using records from the Open Era at the Australian Open, we have reviewed the most successful men’s singles players in the event’s history.
Australian Open men’s singles
There are nine different men’s singles players who have won the Australian Open twice, meaning there is a huge tie for fifth place in the Open Era standings.
Sampras is one of the former greats who has two wins to his name, in 1994 and 1997, as is his fellow American Jim Courier.
The other seven are Boris Becker, Ivan Lendl, Stefan Edberg, Guillermo Vilas, John Newcombe, Johan Kriek and finally Australian Ken Rosewall, who also won the event twice in the amateur era.
In outright fourth place is the Swede Mats Wilander, an Australian Open champion in 1983, 1984 and 1988.
Three-time champion Wilander was also a beaten finalist in 1985 when he came up against compatriot Edberg.
He, Lendl and Djokovic are the only players in Australian Open history to have made three consecutive men’s singles finals (h/t the tournament’s official website).
That brings us to the three most successful players in the history of the Australian Open men’s singles.
Last Updated: Before the 2020 Australian Open
3: Andre Agassi – 4 titles
One place ahead of Wilander with four Australian Open titles is the American great Andre Agassi.
Agassi won the tournament in Melbourne when he played the event for the first time in 1995 and followed that up with successes in 2000, 2001 and 2003.
His last three victories came in the space of four years and the missing year in that sequence, 2002, saw him have to withdraw from the tournament with a wrist injury, pulling out shortly before that event began.
Agassi won on all of his four appearances in the final, his first success coming in four sets in a blockbuster clash against Pete Sampras.
It was five years until he repeated the trick, with another four-set win, this time against Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov, getting him over the line as top seed.
Agassi became a back-to-back champion with an emphatic straight sets victory over France’s Arnaud Clement in the 2001 final.
He then bounced back from missing the 2002 tournament with an even more one-sided final win over Germany’s Rainer Schuttler.
The 2003 Australian Open title proved to be his last of eight Grand Slam titles overall. Indeed, the last three he won in Melbourne were his only majors after the turn of the millennium.
Defeats to Marat Safin (SF) and Roger Federer (QF) in the next two years ended up being his last appearances at the tournament.
At that point, Agassi sat top of the Australian Open list, but he has since been passed twice.
2: Roger Federer – 6 titles
Roger Federer’s Australian Open record is second only to his success at Wimbledon, a tournament he is synonymous with.
A six-time champion and seven-time finalist, Federer’s record in Australia since his first victory in 2004 is remarkable.
That first Melbourne success was his second Grand Slam overall and was sealed with a straight sets win over Marat Safin in the final.
Safin got his revenge with an epic semifinal win in 2005, only for Federer to go on and win the next two Melbourne tournaments, recovering from a set down to beat Marcos Baghdatis the next year and comfortably accounting for Fernando Gonzalez in 2007.
The arrival of Novak Djokovic as a Grand Slam force interrupted that run, the Serbian beating him in the 2008 semifinals, a year before Rafael Nadal won a five-set thriller over Federer in the final, which remains the Swiss star’s only defeat in a Melbourne showpiece (6-1), as well as the Spaniard’s sole success.
Federer was back on top in Australia in 2010 with a straight sets win over Andy Murray, who would go on to lose further finals against Djokovic, though that fourth title for the Swiss star was followed by a six-year dry spell, which included five semifinal exits.
But he was not to be denied. Seven years after his previous victory, Federer lifted the 2017 trophy when he emerged triumphant from another five-set battle with Nadal and another final that went the distance against Marin Cilic the following year gave him an emotional sixth Australian Open crown and 20th Grand Slam overall.
1: Novak Djokovic – 8 titles
Rafael Nadal has dominated the French Open, Roger Federer has made Wimbledon his own, but Novak Djokovic also has a favorite major event with the Australian Open.
Eight titles in the space of 13 tournaments between 2008 and 2020 give Djokovic the outright men’s singles record at the first Grand Slam of the year, both in the Open Era and all time.
He has ruthlessly won all eight of the finals he has appeared in and only on two of those occasions, against Nadal in 2012 and Dominic Thiem in 2020, was he taken the full five-set distance.
That Nadal clash was a battle lasting almost six hours that was rated one of tennis’ best matches of the decade.
Djokovic has piled misery on Andy Murray at this tournament, defeating the Briton in four of his final victories.
After beating Federer with a straight sets semifinal triumph, he won his first title in 2008 against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a victory which also opened his overall Grand Slam account, which now stands at 16.
Aside from Murray (x4), Thiem and Tsonga (x1), his other two victories have come against Nadal, with the most recent coming in 2019.
Djokovic won five out of the six Melbourne events held between 2011 and 2016, his only defeat in that incredible spell coming in the 2014 quarterfinals against eventual champion Stan Wawrinka.
He may one day reach the overall record for Grand Slam titles. If he does, Novak Djokovic will know it is the Australian Open which has played the biggest part in getting him there.