THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — Like Rafael Nadal beating Roger Federer to win Wimbledon in 2008, this felt like a hinge point in men’s tennis.
Back then, Nadal’s win ended a sequence in which he would win in Paris and Federer would triumph in southwest London a month later that went on for four seasons.
Sunday, Jannik Sinner won the Wimbledon title to end a similar exchange between him and Carlos Alcaraz, on hard courts and natural surfaces.
Like Nadal’s 17 years ago, this was the first “away” win in the sequence between the two great rivals. And like Nadal, who had come so close at Wimbledon a year earlier, Sinner did it having suffered an agonizing defeat to Alcaraz even more recently. Only five weeks ago, Sinner lost the French Open final to Alcaraz despite having three championship points and serving for the match. No male player has ever squandered more championship points in a Grand Slam final defeat.
Sinner’s victory also ended a run of five consecutive defeats against Alcaraz. His win on Alcaraz’s patch means he holds three out of the four majors, despite having a 5-8 head-to-head record against his rival; the Spaniard still has more majors — five to Sinner’s four — but if the Italian defends his U.S. Open title in September, he will level the score, and he will have won five of the past eight majors.
Given Paris, and given the recent Alcaraz record, Sinner’s coach Darren Cahill said in a post-match news conference that “he needed that win today.”
Sinner’s rapid rebound is fitting for a player who is fast becoming the ultimate compartmentalizer in tennis. Sinner, who twice tested positive for a banned anabolic steroid last March, went to last year’s U.S. Open days after the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) announced the two anti-doping violations. In the same announcement, the ITIA said that an independent panel had found that Sinner bore “no fault or negligence” for the tests. Sinner, who was provisionally suspended for both violations, appealed those suspensions and was successful, meaning that per ITIA rules, they were lifted quickly and did not become public, allowing him to continue to play.
At Sinner’s pre-U.S. Open news conference, the moderator tried to shut down questions about it, but Sinner answered them all. Then he won the U.S. Open title, his second Grand Slam.
He arrived at the next major, January’s Australian Open, unsure of what the rest of his year would look like. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had announced that it would appeal the “no fault or negligence” ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). WADA, which sits above the ITIA as the worldwide authority in sports doping, was seeking “a period of ineligibility of between one and two years,” in which Sinner would be banned from playing tennis. Both it and the ITIA accepted, however, that Sinner did not intentionally dope.
This was the backdrop for Sinner winning his third Grand Slam, defeating Alexander Zverev in the final, and the post-match news conference was punctuated with questions about his doping case.
A few weeks later, Sinner and WADA entered into a case resolution agreement, in which he received a three-month ban. The ban ran from Feb. 9 to May 4, meaning he did not miss a Grand Slam before returning to competitive tennis at his home event: the Italian Open, in Rome.
That ban, as well as the original ruling of “no fault or negligence,” drew widespread criticism in the tennis world, with former players and commentators, as well as some of Sinner’s active peers on the ATP Tour. They alleged double standards and accused the bodies of favorable treatment, despite the case and its resolutions being handled in accordance with anti-doping rules.
It caused furor across the sport, but Sinner has responded to it by playing, winning, and then playing and winning some more.
In a recent interview with The Athletic, Sinner’s former coach, Riccardo Piatti, said that when Sinner was a junior skier, he would enter a different plane of concentration after putting on his helmet. The same thing would happen, Piatti said, when Sinner put on his cap to play tennis.
“I feel like when I play the match, I can switch off and just play. I believe that this helped me a lot,” Sinner said in his news conference Sunday.
“I wouldn’t have coped,” Cahill said of the past five weeks.
“I think for most normal athletes that get into that position and have 0-40, 5-3 in the fourth set, match points to win Roland Garros, and certainly his year has been… I don’t know the right word to sum it up, but it’s been challenging for everybody involved.
“He has a mentality on the tennis court that is special, and that’s why he and Carlos are doing what they’re doing.”
Cahill put Sinner’s ability to stay level-headed down to his parents and upbringing. His dad missed the French Open final because he had a shift at the restaurant where he works, which helped his son put things in perspective.
After some sleepless nights in the immediate aftermath, Sinner said Friday that he got over Paris by having a barbecue and playing table tennis with his friends. An hour or so earlier, Alcaraz had said that he absolutely did not expect any letdown from Sinner in Sunday’s final as a result of what had happened at Roland-Garros. His tone was as if to say: “Um, have you seen this guy?”
“He didn’t surprise me at all because I know he’s a really nice player and a huge champion. Champions learn from the losses.
“I knew at the beginning that he was going to learn from that final, not going to make the same mistakes as they did in the French Open final,” Alcaraz said after Sunday’s final.
Sinner’s run to the title could have been so very different. In the fourth round, he trailed an inspired Grigor Dimitrov by two sets, having taken a nasty fall in the first game when he had hurt his elbow. He then benefited from a huge slice of luck when Dimitrov had to retire because of a pectoral injury, with the score level at 2-2 in the third set.
Cahill and his fellow coach, Simone Vagnozzi, emphasized to Sinner that he had caught a break, but that it was time to forget about it as soon as lightning had struck. Sinner duly did, easing past Ben Shelton and a compromised version of seven-time champion Novak Djokovic in his next two matches to reach the final, where he had to use the French Open defeat as fuel, rather than letting it become an albatross.
“We talked a little bit about his game (after Paris), maybe being a little bit braver in the bigger moments,” Cahill said.
Like Nadal’s victory in 2008, this win will take Sinner’s rivalry with Alcaraz to a new place, but it is unlikely to meaningfully change its import for the rest of the tour. Sinner’s win, and Alcaraz’s defending 1,300 of the 2,000 ranking points he had on the line as defending champion entrenches them as No. 1 and No. 2 in both the world rankings and the “Race to Turin,” which counts points earned this season. Barring an extraordinary injury or a surge from one of their peers, they are going to be seeded on opposite sides of Grand Slam draws for a very long time.
More importantly for Sinner, Sunday’s win proves what the Italian has been telling the world with his tennis for the better part of a year: there’s no disappointment or distraction too big to knock Sinner off his stride.
For a tennis player competing at the top of a sport where tough losses are baked in, that’s possibly the greatest superpower of all.
(Top photo: Frey / TPN via Getty Images)
