THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — Here they are again, five weeks later. Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz will walk onto Centre Court for the Wimbledon final Sunday, just over a month after their French Open final classic. At the same time, they will float further away from the rest of the field at the top of their sport.

Before they duelled for five hours and 29 minutes on the Roland Garros clay, that match already had a pyrrhic quality for the rest of the ATP Tour.

One of Alcaraz and Sinner had to lose that final. And Sinner eventually lost it in one of the worst ways, having held three championship points and having served for the title. But as they rocketed groundstrokes and fizzed across the red brickdust and carved out extraordinary angles, it became clearer and clearer that, in the grand scheme of tennis, neither player would lose that final, everybody else would, even the player best placed to be a bulwark against their rising tide: 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic.

He lost against Sinner at Roland-Garros and has done so again at Wimbledon, both times in the semifinals. Djokovic, 38, who was compromised by injury on the grass against Sinner this year, just as he was last year against Alcaraz in the final here, refused to put that down to ill luck in his post-match news conference.

“I don’t think it’s bad fortune. It’s just age, the wear and tear of the body. As much as I’m taking care of it, the reality hits me right now — last year and a half — like never before, to be honest,” Djokovic said.

More than any other player bidding to disrupt their duopoly, Djokovic knows about the cycle that Sinner and Alcaraz are creating. When he, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were dominating men’s tennis, the more they played each other, the better they became. When they came down from their stratospheric matches to face tennis’ mere mortals, they had been practicing on another plane. The others stood little chance.

But their dominance, alongside Andy Murray’s continual presence in the late stages of Grand Slams, had another effect. They locked other players out of the experience of being in a semifinal or final of a major, let alone losing one — and when that experience did come, these debutants were thrown onto the biggest stage against its biggest characters.

Sinner and Alcaraz, as a duo, can’t have the same impact — but the more finals they play, the fewer the other players can play, and use as experience. And the more finals Sinner and Alcaraz play, the harder it becomes for those in the tier below to meet them there.

Djokovic takes the past 18 months as the new reality, but going back to the 2024 Australian Open better illustrates how Alcaraz and Sinner have eradicated what could have been Sliding Doors moments at the Grand Slams.

Alcaraz and Sinner were on the same side of the draw at three of the four majors in 2024: the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. In Paris, they met in the semifinals. Still, between them, they won all three events. Djokovic’s knee surgery weeks before last summer’s Wimbledon meant he was not fully able to meet that moment; at Roland-Garros, Alcaraz came from 2-1 down in sets to beat Alexander Zverev, and in New York, after the Spaniard went out in the second round against Botic van de Zandschulp, Sinner still surged to the title.

In winning those tournaments, and in dominating the majors so far in 2025, Alcaraz and Sinner have erased that world of possibility.

Their gap to world No. 3 Zverev will be a minimum of 2,290 points when Wimbledon is over later today. If Alcaraz wins his third straight title here, it will be 2,990. At the end of last year’s Wimbledon, Djokovic was world No. 2, in a Sinner-Alcaraz sandwich, with Zverev only 1,000 points behind the Spaniard at No. 4 in the rankings.

In the ATP “Race to Turin”, which counts points won this season, Sinner is nearly 2,000 points ahead of No. 3 Djokovic, despite missing three months serving a doping suspension. Alcaraz is 2,240 points clear of Sinner.

They are less established as No. 1 and No. 2 than entrenched, guaranteeing themselves seedings on the opposite side of majors draws and making it more likely than not that, for anyone else to win a Grand Slam title, they will have to beat them both in the process. Nobody has done that yet.

So as they walk onto Centre Court in a few hours for another final that one of them has to lose, the feeling remains that, at large, all Alcaraz and Sinner really do is win.

(Top photo: Andy Cheung / Getty Images)