Who is the favorite?

If we’re only talking about the last few weeks, Kopriva is the best.

That’s not the case at all in terms of the odds, Kopriva is clearly the underdog and we’re going to try to understand why. The main argument is the quick turnaround after Rio and the change in conditions: we’re going from heavy clay with huge humidity and night session matches to Santiago, which is at altitude, where they play during the day in 30-degree heat and the balls really fly. The transition isn’t easy, especially when a player goes deep in Rio like Kopriva did. His level was perfect, nothing to say about that, but he just lost in the semi after a 3h30 match on Sunday, so physically there’s reason to be worried, and it’s obviously for those two reasons that he’s the underdog.

I think that without this tight schedule we’d be pretty close to a coin flip, because you shouldn’t write off Navone either. The Argentine isn’t taking off in this Golden Swing, but he hasn’t forgotten how to play tennis, it will come back. He hasn’t had incredible draws, but in terms of level of play he hasn’t looked at his best to me, he’s making a lot of errors and actually taking quite a few risks. Up against a solid and intelligent player like Kopriva, who also knows how to use the angles, Navone will have to produce his best match or simply hope that the Czech is completely spent!