“Legit thought this was Justin Bieber and then I looked again” – Holger Rune’s look ahead of ATP Finals confuses tennis fans

Holger Rune's different look ahead of the 2023 ATP Finals has made tennis fans think he looks like Canadian singer Justin Bieber.

Rune made the cut into the ATP Finals draw as the eighth man on the back of a quarterfinal finish at the Paris Masters that concluded recently. He lost to Novak Djokovic in the last-eight stage.

The Dane would debut at the year-end championships in the pool that includes Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev, Jannik Sinner, Andrey Rublev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Alexander Zverev. The tournament will begin on Sunday, November 12, at Pala Alpitour in Turin, Italy.

Rune shared an image of himself, on board the flight to Turin, on social media recently. In the photograph, he can be spotted wearing a knitted cap with a faint goatee that left the tennis fans wondering if it was actually him. A fan wrote:

"No this is not him, I refuse to believe it's him."

A second fan felt the 20-year-old Rune looked like a full-grown adult.

"Wait he looks like a grown a** man," the fan tweeted.

A third fan revealed he took Holger Rune for Justin Beiber.

"Legit thought this was Bieber and then I looked again," the fan tweeted.

A user went as far as writing the lyrics to Bieber's blockbuster hit single 'Baby'.

"My first love broke my heart for the first time and i was like baby baby baby oohh like baby baby baby ooh like baby baby baby ooh i thought you'd always be mine, mine," the user wrote.

Here are a few more reactions from X (formerly Twitter):

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Holger Rune: "Boris Becker helped me a lot in this, I’ve come back from almost nowhere"

Boris Becker watches Holger Rune in action at the Paris Masters - Day Five.

Holger Rune recently extended his gratitude towards his new coach Boris Becker for helping him turn things around after a four-month-long bumpy ride on tennis courts.

“It is never easy to reverse a negative spiral like the one I went through in the past months," Rune told Sportsklub.

Since the Wimbledon Championships, which concluded in July of this year, Rune has competed at six tournaments before joining hands with Becker. At five out of those six events, including the US Open, the Dane failed to register a single victory.

Becker accompanied the youngster at the Swiss Indoors in Basel in full capacity for the first time and straightaway helped him finish as a semifinalist. Later, Rune stretched World No. 1 Novak Djokovic to three sets in the quarterfinals of the Paris Masters.

“Boris helped me a lot in this, I’ve come back from almost nowhere, from a period where I was losing all the time in the first round to a big match like this against Novak, close to my best level," Holger Rune added.

The World No. 10 was previously coached by Lars Christensen and Patrick Mouratoglou.