The world’s eight best singles players and doubles teams gathered at London’s historic Cutty Sark Thursday night for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals Official Launch presented by Moët and Chandon. Cutty Sark is the legendary 19^th century sailing ship, the fastest of her time, and now an award-winning tourist attraction.

Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, who will battle at the season-ending tournament to become year-end No. 1 in the Emirates ATP Rankings, were joined by Stan Wawrinka, Milos Raonic, Kei Nishikori, Gael Monfils, Marin Cilic and Dominic Thiem.

Also attending were the world’s top 8 doubles teams, including Frenchmen Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut, and Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares, who will fight for the year-end No. 1 doubles ranking.

During the evening, Murray was presented with a trophy commemorating his rise last Monday to No. 1 in the Emirates ATP Rankings, when he became just the 26^th player (since 1973) to hold that mantle.

The evening featured a performance by loop pedal beatbox artist THePETEBOX, best known for his ‘Future Loops’ work. The musician enlisted the help of all eight singles players, who contributed their voices to a new loop pedal.

Guests were also briefed on a new partnership between the ATP and UNICEF, the launch of the Super 8, in which the world’s best eight players come together at the season-ending finale on a mission to help UNICEF raise awareness and vital funds to protect children from danger.

Cilic was among a number of winners of this year’s ATP Awards presented by Moët & Chandon to be recognised during the event. Cilic was presented with the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian of the Year Award for his work with the Marin Cilic Foundation, established this year to support educational projects around the world. The foundation has a special emphasis on giving youth in Croatia improved access to school and university education.

More: Djokovic Aims For Sixth Title At Barclays ATP World Tour Finals

Other players to receive awards were Lucas Pouille (Most Improved), Taylor Fritz (ATP Star of Tomorrow presented by Emirates) and Bob and Mike Bryan (ATPWorldTour.com Fans’ Favourite presented by Moët & Chandon).

Roger Federer (Fans’ Favourite and Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship) and Juan Martin del Potro (Comeback Player of the Year) did not attend but sent video messages.

Magnus Norman, coach of tournament third seed Stan Wawrinka, accepted the inaugural ATP Coach of the Year award.

The Barclays ATP World Tour Finals begin Sunday at The O2 in London. Djokovic, the four-time defending champion, is chasing a record-equalling sixth season finale title. Murray is looking to reach the final for the first time and is guaranteed to finish the year No. 1 if he wins the title.

How could anyone ever suggest Stan Wawrinka is a conformist when he dared to wear patterned ‘country club’ shorts, which clashed with the rest of his outfit, for one Grand Slam final, and then opted for a uniform shade of fuscia, right down to his watch strap, for another?

Wawrinka is most certainly not as other men or, more precisely, is not of the same sort of character as the other four players to have dominated tennis during what is widely regarded to have been a golden era for the ATP World Tour. Of course, no one seriously believes that Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray all have the same, or even strikingly similar, characters (this isn’t a sport populated by clones). However, Wawrinka is quite different to the rest of the tennis elite – for one thing, he didn’t even reach his peak until he was nearing his 30s.

Humble is not a word you would imagine using to describe somebody whose career has brought him some of the biggest prizes in sport, including an ATP World Tour Masters 1000 in Monte-Carlo and three Grand Slams, the third of which came at this year’s US Open. Or someone who has been as high as No. 3 in the Emirates ATP Rankings and, who, in his single-handed backhand, has one of the most devastating shots in the modern game. But it’s an adjective that surely applies to this 31-year-old Swiss with a shy and unassuming nature, who often doesn’t seem too bothered by the trappings of success and fame.

Given a couple of weeks off from the jet-set lifestyle of competing on the ATP World Tour, he likes nothing better than to head home to rural Switzerland and the family farm in St. Barthélemy, a hamlet just a quarter of an hour’s drive from Lausanne. Wawrinka doesn’t actually pick up tools and work the land at every opportunity, but the farmer’s son still knows how to drive a tractor. And because the farm is designed as a centre for people with special needs, it set him up with an understanding of those less fortunate than himself. A childhood on that farm has made a lasting impression on his character. “I learned to always fight hard to achieve what I want,” he once told the New York Times. “In this regard, I was incredibly lucky.”

Wawrinka’s manager, Lawrence Frankopan of StarWing Sports, says his client’s image isn’t that of a superstar, but a man of the people: ‘We adopted ‘Stan the Man’ as a logo.” But there’s nothing ordinary about Wawrinka when he walks on to a tennis court. The barrel-chested Wawrinka looks more like a rugby centre than someone at home on a baseline. But his build, while unusual at the highest level of tennis, has given him great power and endurance on court, and they aren’t bad qualities to have when there are trophies on the line.

With three major titles to his name – after defeating Djokovic in this year’s US Open final – Wawrinka is on a level with Murray (though the pair are some distance behind Federer’s collection of 17 majors, Nadal’s 14 slams or Djokovic’s 12 majors). Across the game, there is great respect for Wawrinka, who, until he lost out to German teenager Alexander Zverev in the late-September showdown for the St. Petersburg title, had been on an astonishing winning streak in finals, with that sequence stopped at 11.

“Stan is a big match player,” Djokovic has said. “He loves to play on the big stage against big players, because that’s when he elevates his level of performance in his game. He just gets much better. He’s a very powerful player with a big serve and probably the best, most effective one-handed backhand in the world right now. He can play it all and has that variety in his game. He can be very dangerous for everybody.”

For years, Wawrinka’s friend and compatriot Federer was regarded as untouchable on the ATP World Tour. Time has, of course, moved on, and so has the sport. But Wawrinka, modest to the core, blushes at suggestions that tennis’ Big Four has become a Famous Five. “I don’t think it’s fair on them to put me in there. They have been there for more than 10 years. They have been winning everything and I think it is just not fair,” he has said. “The Big Four stay the Big Four, like that. I am me.”

Once again, with this the fourth successive season he has qualified among the top eight, Wawrinka will be a contender for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals. Every previous time he has arrived on the banks of the River Thames, Wawrinka has successfully navigated his way through his group to reach the knock-out stages, though he has never gone beyond the semi-finals. Perhaps this will be the year when the ‘Stanimal’ – who often hits top form at the crucial stage of a tournament – can make his first final in London and then go on to score this title.

Just don’t ever expect him to eulogise about his accomplishments.

“I still feel that my best years are ahead,” said Andy Murray this summer, during a sponsor appearance at the Thruxton race track in Hampshire. History and precedent were against him, because only one man in the modern era – Andre Agassi – has won multiple Grand Slam titles after his 30th birthday. Murray turned 29 in May.

Yet from that moment in early June when he made his claim, standing alongside the WWII aircraft hangars at the side of the track, Murray produced the most dominant sequence of his career. The statistics were extraordinary. Going into next week’s Barclays ATP World Tour Finals, he has lost just three matches since Roland Garros. In a twist that no one would have predicted, he wiped out the 8,035-point lead held by Novak Djokovic at the start of the grass-court season, and on Monday, 7 November moved to No. 1 in the Emirates ATP Rankings.

For a man who had spent the last decade in the slipstream of three even more successful players – in Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic – this was a gratifying and long-awaited moment. “It’s something I never expected to do, never thought I was going to do,” said Murray. “When you’re behind the guys that I was behind, it’s difficult to keep believing, keep working to try to get there. I think that’s the most satisfying thing, because of how good the guys around me have been.”

The magical run started when Murray notched his fifth Queen’s title in June – an achievement that nobody else has matched after more than a century of competition. Then he cantered through Wimbledon, beating Milos Raonic in a one-sided final, and topped the whole thing off with an Olympic gold medal in Rio de Janeiro. Surging through the autumn, he has won his last four tournaments, in Beijing, Shanghai, Vienna and Paris, so taking his portfolio for 2016 to eight titles, which is a personal record for one season.

How do we explain this avalanche of success? Amateur psychologists identified his newfound status as a doting father (of Sophia Olivia, born on 7 February) as a spur for success.

Pure tennisheads, meanwhile, were more inclined to credit Ivan Lendl, the Czech hard case who had overseen the previous blossoming of Murray’s full potential in 2012 and 2013. Had it not been the announcement of Lendl’s return, the day before Queen’s, that set off that extraordinary second half of the season? At the same time, though, don’t we sometimes ascribe too much importance to coaches? Wasn’t there an element of truth behind Murray’s sly comment, in his speech after the Wimbledon final, that Lendl had just been “lucky” in the timing of his return?

After all, it was the player himself who had spent the 2015-16 off-season rebuilding his service action – a key ingredient of his mid-season surge. As a result, Murray was clocked at 141mph during his fourth-round match against Grigor Dimitrov at the US Open, which is believed to be the fastest of his career. Even more crucially, he can regularly approach 100mph on his second delivery, eliminating the one weakness that most of his opponents have targeted over the past decade.

Murray has many strengths as a player but this constant thirst for improvement, even at this mature stage of his career, is a trademark. His mastery of tactics applies not only to patterns of play, but to the way he has constructed his own career. Just look at his bold decision to travel to Spain at the age of 15, where 18 months at the Sanchez-Casal Academy taught him to fend for himself. Or at his pursuit of Lendl. Many players would have shied away from engaging the ruthless taskmaster with the basilisk stare. Murray has done so twice.

The true measure of his progress this year was the sheer consistency that he produced on the ATP World Tour. As Murray said himself: “Getting to No. 1 is about 12 months of work. I have never done that before. In my career, I have had periods where I have been consistent for a few months at a time and then drop-offs. Whereas, this year, barring the month in March, I couldn’t have done much better.”

So what of Murray’s prospects at the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals? As a local who can drive into North Greenwich from his Surrey home in less than an hour, he might be expected to prosper at this tournament. As well as home fans, it offers a rock-and-roll vibe. Yet his record, since the tournament moved to London in 2009, has been curiously intermittent.

There was the great semi-final against Nadal in 2010, which Nadal took 8-6 in the deciding tie-break. And another semi-final against Federer two years later. Otherwise, though, Murray has returned a moderate win-loss record of 11-11, and has also struggled physically at this late stage of the season.

One of Murray’s most memorable moments at the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals came two years ago. He was lounging on his sofa, lost in a round of the Mario Kart video game, when he received a phone call from Chris Kermode, the ATP Executive Chairman and President. Could he sub in for Federer, who had been forced to pull out of his final against Djokovic with back trouble? Murray jumped straight in the car and performed exhibition singles and doubles without asking for payment.

That fine gesture showed Murray’s true colours. Perhaps this will be the year when he claims the giant octagonal cup – that would be a belated reward for the man whose best years could still be ahead of him.