Peter Lundgren, tennis player and coach to Roger Federer

As Mark Philippoussis fizzed his return into the net and Roger Federer sank to his knees and raised his arms skywards in triumph, the new Wimbledon champion glanced at the players’ box on Centre Court where his coach celebrated his protégé’s maiden grand slam title.
The 2003 straight-sets triumph over the Australian was the first of 20 grand slam singles titles for the Swiss, who knew that the guidance of Peter Lundgren was critical in his progress from callow youth to champion.
A gifted former player, Lundgren turned to coaching and made his reputation helping the combustible Chilean Marcelo Ríos reach the world’s top ten. In 1997 he took a job nurturing juniors at the Swiss tennis academy near Berne. He accepted the role reluctantly, since it meant leaving behind his Sweden-based girlfriend and two young children. But the evident brilliance of the 16-year-old Federer was no small compensation for the hardship.
“When I saw Roger the first time, I thought, this guy is going to be a superstar, 100 per cent. It was a no-brainer,” Lundgren told Christopher Clarey, the journalist and author. There was, however, room for improvement. Lundgren booted Federer out of their first practice session for messing around. “Physically, he was weak. And the backhand was a nice swing but no legs, nothing,” he told Clarey. “He was lazy, but he had an incredible forehand.”
Federer was also easily distracted. To battle his low boredom threshold and mollify his temper, Lundgren and his fellow coaches introduced squash, badminton, football and table tennis into the training programme and sent him to a sports psychologist.
The convivial Lundgren, whose excellence as a coach sprang as much from his gusto, empathy and versatility as from his technical ability, became akin to a big brother to the teenager, teaching him Swedish swearwords, encouraging the vegetarian to eat meat and driving him to tournaments in a blue Peugeot 306. Federer once called Lundgren for assistance when he was unable to solve a puzzle in a James Bond Nintendo game.
They often played video games together; on the rare occasions that Lundgren beat him, Federer would hurl the console across the room in fury. “He’d tell me, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just buy another one’,” Lundgren recalled to New York magazine. “When he had to pay for everything himself, that’s when he really grew up.”
When Federer chose a full-time coach to travel with him on the professional circuit in 1999, the Swiss agonised before opting for Lundgren ahead of Peter Carter, an Australian. Carter played a significant role in shaping Federer’s technique but had less top-level playing experience than Lundgren.
The year 2003 was the best of Federer’s career up to that point. Yet he sacked Lundgren at the end of a season that brought a tour-leading $4 million in prize money, Wimbledon glory and a straight-sets victory over Andre Agassi in the final of the Tennis Masters Cup. The 22-year-old ruthlessly concluded that the partnership was growing stale and he needed more independence and a new voice, though it was not until 2005 that he hired the Australian Tony Roche.
Tired of travelling for 40 weeks of the year and missing his family, Lundgren was far from distraught. He began working with the volcanic Russian Marat Safin, and helped him win the Australian Open in 2005.
In Federer, Ríos and Safin, Lundgren coached three players who held the world No 1 ranking. Remarkably, when he reached his own career peak of 25th in December 1985, Lundgren was only the sixth-best Swede in the standings — and about to drop to seventh. Though the population of Sweden was under nine million at the time, the nation rivalled the United States for dominance of men’s tennis from the mid-Seventies to the early Nineties thanks to the exploits of stars such as Stefan Edberg, Mats Wilander and Lundgren’s idol, Bjorn Borg.
“Besides all the great Swedish players,” Lundgren told the author Robert Davis, “I was able to play some of the legends like [John] McEnroe, [Jimmy] Connors, and [Ivan] Lendl. I believe that helped me tremendously as a coach. I had seen a lot of good tennis, and I knew what it took to be great.”
Hans Peter Lundgren was born in Kramfors municipality, northern Sweden, in 1965. When he was ten his family moved to the city of Sundsvall, where there was a tennis court near their home. He played ice hockey in the winter and tennis in the summer. Copying Borg’s forehand and his shaggy-haired, head-banded blond look, Lundgren moved to Stockholm to improve his game and trained with his hero, who retired in 1983, aged 26.
They usually played matches, and Borg, nine years Lundgren’s senior, usually won. “I was completely exhausted after a session with him. Sometimes I had to go home and lie down and rest,” Lundgren told a Swedish newspaper. When he started beating Borg regularly, Lundgren realised he was ready for the big time. Borg gave him $25,000 to pay for a coach. Lundgren knew Borg so well that he convincingly impersonated the superstar in prank phone calls to other Swedish players.
Too inconsistent and weak on clay to threaten the top ten, Lundgren won three ATP Tour singles tournaments. He reached the fourth round at Wimbledon in 1989, losing to Lendl, and the final of the men’s doubles at the Australian Open in 1988. Lundgren and the Briton Jeremy Bates were defeated by the American pair Jim Pugh and Rick Leach. There were occasional victories over stars such as Lendl, Wilander and Pat Cash, then the newly crowned Wimbledon champion. But Lundgren lost motivation after a succession of defeats to Boris Becker and Edberg and retired aged 30.
Unmarried, the relationship with the mother of his children, Lukas and Julia, who live in Sweden, failed to survive his move to Switzerland. In 2006 he was hired by the Lawn Tennis Association to coach the British Davis Cup team but was placed on gardening leave in 2007 after allegedly slurring his words during a conference. He quit in 2008 and went on to coach more top-ten ranked players: Marcos Baghdatis, Stan Wawrinka, Grigor Dimitrov and Daniela Hantuchova.
After nearly a decade in Houston, Texas, where he coached at a facility in a luxury shopping centre, Lundgren grew weary of the heat and of pushy parents who cared only about money. He returned to Sundsvall in 2020 to live with his mother, Ulla. He suffered from type 2 diabetes, which led to the amputation of his left foot last year after an infected broken ankle failed to heal.
Perhaps the most difficult moment of his career came in 2002. It fell to Lundgren to break the news to a distraught Federer when Carter died in a car accident on a honeymoon trip to Kruger National Park. Federer’s mother is South African and the family had suggested the destination.
“Roger had worked with Peter since he was a kid, so he felt very alone when he died,” Lundgren told a reporter. “He really just needed someone to talk to. Coaching isn’t just about tennis, it’s about life.”
Peter Lundgren, tennis coach and player, was born on January 29, 1965. He died of undisclosed causes on August 22, 2024, aged 59