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Wimbledon 2024: Jannik Sinner's lively, new rivalry with Carlos Alcaraz
Summary
If mild-mannered Jannik Sinner gets close to winning his first Wimbledon, Centre Court will be noisy and colourful, especially if his opponent is the swashbuckling Carlos AlcarazEven for a top player, there is something unique about the way Jannik Sinner strikes the ball. Instead of the thwack of many other players, his forehands and backhands sound like a rifle shot. It is all the more extraordinary as he is one of the skinniest players on the circuit. His racket speed and Federesque timing are the reason he generates so much pace. As his coach Dareen Cahill, who has worked with Andre Agassi and Lleyton Hewitt, says, “The way he hits the ball, it just sounds special."
At 22, and 75.7kg and 6ft, 2 inches , the gangly teenager looks more like an overgrown junior than world number one. Until the gunshots start to land within inches of the lines, that is. In the last event of 2023, the Davis Cup playoffs, this symphony of aggression was especially loud in his three-set victory over Novak Djokovic. It was an indoor event, which, if anything, amplified the Sinner sound. But when Sinner stared down three consecutive match points against Djokovic, which would have put Serbia into the final, and then eventually led Italy to a first Davis Cup win in decades by outplaying Australia in the final, it was clear that Malaga was going to be a foundation for the run at number one.
And, so it proved in Melbourne a couple of months later, where Sinner won his first Grand Slam, decimating Djokovic for the first two sets of the semis, with what looked like a continuation of their year-end slugfests in 2023 but with Sinner clearly in the ascendant, making the Serb look, of all things, slow-footed. Then in the finals, he showed grit and determination to come from behind to beat Daniil Medvedev, erasing a two-set deficit.
BECOMING WORLD NUMBER ONE
This month, Sinner seized the world number one spot, which was the occasion for a return to the ski town he grew up in the Dolomites region of Italy, which borders Austria. The video produced by the Association of Tennis Professionals to commemorate this rite of passage was also a testament to how unlikely his ascent to the pinnacle of tennis has been. “If you imagine coming from here, (becoming) a tennis player, it’s very, very strange," Sinner said this month on his return to the town where he grew up.
Sinner’s early childhood was consumed by training to be a champion skier, not a tennis champion. As he recalled in the video, as a young boy, he would ski daily for two hours after school and then play football. At the age of eight, he won a national championship award in giant slalom skiing. At 13, his father Johann convinced him to concentrate on tennis, but Sinner did not really make a mark as a junior. After winning the Australian Open this January, he recalled calling his parents after losing a match as a junior to explain what had happened. They listened for a couple of minutes until his mother Siglinde calmly said they needed to get back to work. Sinner said he learned to keep things in perspective because his parents were so level-headed about his tennis. “I wish that everyone could have my parents because they always let me choose whatever I want to do, even when I was younger," Sinner said in his speech after winning the Australian Open.
An arguably underappreciated aspect of the Italian’s game is that his early start as a skiing champion partly explains his cheetah-like court coverage. Sinner not only moves fast but is exceptionally nimble for a tall man. The highlight reels from his first two matches to start the grass court season this year in Halle, an important Wimbledon warm-up event he went on to win last Sunday, showed him practically somersaulting on the grass to make difficult returns on the forehand side and then picking himself up with time enough to hit perfectly placed shots to win the points.
These attributes as a shotmaker and counterpuncher and a beefed up serve, thanks to a changed stance when he serves, makes Sinner a perfect foil for the swashbuckling tennis of Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz. The tennis world’s seemingly existential dilemma, centred around that question of “After Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, who", has receded into the background as tennis fans enjoy this lively and friendly rivalry. Alcaraz is the more charismatic of the two and more inventive in devising new strategies on court when he is behind.
It is also true that other than their outstanding US Open quarterfinal in 2022, in their two other Grand Slam meetings, they have not both played well at the same time. The epic battles at Grand Slams between the two that would stir fans up in the way Federer, Djokovic and Nadal did are hopefully only a tournament or two away.
TENNIS' NICE GUY
The other problem for a sport that needs a younger audience is that Sinner is paradoxically too much of a nice guy. Asked about his childhood in the Dolomites this month, his naughtiest escapade turned out to be coming back in the early evening 15 minutes after his parents wanted him home. “We played football and we were all the time together with friends and nobody had a phone, he recalled. “We only had a watch and the parents they said, ‘Look, at five you should be at home’. And sometimes you arrived at 5:15 and then the parents, they got pissed a little bit!"
The ATP video that resulted from these interviews, though not as dull or overhyped as Amazon Prime’s Federer: Twelve Final Days, was less than riveting. In this rivalry, Alacaraz has thus far cornered the star power, starting with his tattoo that repeats the motto his grandfather gave him: cabeza, corazon y cajones (head, heart, balls) to his more than occasionally theatrical on-court demeanour.
Still, on court, Sinner’s demeanour is as calm and unflappable as the Swiss. Coupled with explosive shotmaking and modesty, this is garnering its share of fans. A group of Italians, dressed like comic book characters to resemble giant carrots, follow him from tournament to tournament. If the mild-mannered Italian gets close to winning his first Wimbledon, Centre Court will both be noisy and colourful, especially if his opponent is Alcaraz. Occasional Wimbledon rains notwithstanding, the gods clearly adore men’s tennis. After two decades of a three-cornered rivalry for the history books, in Alcaraz and Sinner, men’s tennis potentially has a dream rivalry again.
Rahul Jacob is a former travel, food and drink editor of Financial Times, London, and a columnist for Mint.
