Go back to last September. Jannik Sinner just lost in the round of 16 at the US Open to Alexander Zverev in a sweaty, five-set mess.
He has never been to the final of a Grand Slam. He’s only won one of the tournaments just below that level, and that’s only in the last few weeks. No-one is disputing his promise, but not many people are predicting a rocket ride to the top, or anything like what has since unfolded for the carrot-topped 22-year-old Italian.
Now flash forward seven months…
“He’s the best player in the world right now,” said Grigor Dimitrov, the 32-year-old Bulgarian who now knows better than anyone.
Dimitrov was crushed by Sinner in the Miami Open final on Sunday 6-3, 6-1. It was the 23rd win in 24 starts this season for Sinner. He reached No. 2 in the new rankings as a result, a huge achievement for him, and the latest sign of turmoil in a season filled with them.
For years, professional tennis, especially on the men’s side, had an air of predictability.
Everyone has been rooting for Novak Djokovic lately, and as he did last year, when he won three Grand Slams, he should have won the other one and ended the year at No. 1, there wasn’t much to suggest that this year would be any different, except and if Carlos Alcaraz was ready to take over.
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On the women’s side, Iga Swiatek was largely unstoppable and figured she was for quite some time.
As for the sport itself, the players faced a never-ending schedule and a packed calendar that gave them little free time, but the people who ran tennis, the leaders of the Grand Slams and the men’s and women’s tours, always put their hands up and said that’s the way it should be, now and forever.
It took three months to throw all of that out the window, or maybe the best metaphor is to put it on the shelf. After all, there’s still time for Djokovic to be Djokovic again, for Swiatek to win with the level of consistency he had a 37-game winning streak not long ago, and for any plans to reshape the sport to fizzle out like the sporadic efforts of the past.
And yet, at the first turn of the 2024 tennis season, as the game shifts from the hard courts of Australia, the Middle East and North America that dominate the first quarter of the year to the organic surfaces of Europe for the spring and early summer , the mystery has become the narrative, and never more so than at the Miami Open over the past two weeks.
If, last September, you had on your bingo card Sinner to become the world’s dominant player and Danielle Collins, an American ranked 53rd in the world, to win a major title, then fair play to you. Not many of us, but that’s how the first quarter of the season goes — a world of surprise and chaos where what recently seemed so unlikely becomes more likely with each passing week.
Djokovic hasn’t won a tournament all year and hasn’t even reached the final of the Australian Open, which he has won 10 times, and has done so with little resistance in recent years. Last week, he fired his longtime coach Goran Ivanisevic, who had helped him win a dozen Grand Slams in recent years. Djokovic, who has let go of several other long-time members of his team over the past six months, said he did not know when or if he would hire a new coach. He can fly on his own for a while.
His apparent successor, Alcaraz, showed flashes of his old magical self at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California during the first half of the so-called Sunshine Double that concluded in Miami last weekend. But a player who seemed so full of joy at his rise to the top of the sport said he has been struggling for months to find those emotions in training and in matches. Really.
Did you think Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece, just 25 years old and a one-time attempt to take over the game, could emerge from 2023 healthy and ready to fulfill his promise? Not so much.
Tsitsipas, so committed to tennis for so long, balances his preparations with some chaos outside his former world. He has been in love with women’s tennis star Paula Badosa since the middle of last year. He fell out of the top 10 in February and is hoping for a turnaround on the European soil he loves so much.
Swiatek was unstoppable in stretches and extremely winning in others. Swiatek’s hit list this season includes Linda Noskova of the Czech Republic and two Russians, Anna Kalinskaya and Ekaterina Alexandrova. Only Alexandrova is in the top 20.
(Robert Prange/Getty Images)
The most likely candidate to unseat Swiatek is Aryna Sabalenka, who briefly replaced her at No. 1 last fall but is just 3-3 since winning the Australian Open and now dealing with personal tragedy.
Two weeks ago, a recent boyfriend, Konstantin Koltsov, a former hockey player and her partner of the past three years, was found dead in what police in Miami ruled an apparent suicide. Sabalenka played at the Miami Open days after Koltsov’s death, losing her second match, but has not spoken publicly other than to post a brief statement on social media.
“Konstantin’s death is an unimaginable tragedy and while we were no longer together, my heart is broken,” Sabalenka wrote. “Please respect my privacy and the privacy of his family during this difficult time.”
She has been training since the loss, trying to return to something close to normal, but her state of mind when the clay court season begins this month is anyone’s guess. The 25-year-old Sabalenka lost her father when she was 19 years old.
(Robert Prange/Getty Images)
As for the game itself, there’s a corporate civil war going on, with the Grand Slams trying to replace the current 11-month free-for-all season with a premium tour featuring only their own tournaments and the other top 10 events on the calendar. such as the Sunshine Double, and the finals of each tour. Only the top 100 or so qualify.
The remaining tennis will be relegated to a qualifying round. The rest of the men’s and women’s tours, the ATP and WTA, pretty much hate this idea as it robs them of much of their relevance. Their leaders are trying to cement a partnership with Saudi Arabia that would largely upend the status quo that dozens of players despise – and add another tournament in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
This tour makes players compete in the longest season in sports for a fraction of the money that golfers and other athletes make. They gave the leaders of their newfound confederation, the Professional Tennis Association, a “burn the boats” order earlier as well. More meetings to sort this all out are likely to take place in Madrid at the end of the month.
Through all the uncertainty, Sinner has strangely become the constant.
Four tournaments, three titles, one semifinal and only one loss — to Alcaraz, the eventual champion at Indian Wells. It is not bad.
(Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
He felt he had turned a corner at the end of last season, when he beat Djokovic twice and led Italy to the Davis Cup final — but he didn’t expect to win with the clinical efficiency he has this season. There is a quality to it that is, in the most technical tennis term, bananas. “I didn’t expect that, for sure,” he said.
There’s a seductive cruelty to the way Sinner hits people these days.
One moment an opponent digs in, trades service games, rallies back and forth. Then all it takes is a volley that comes off the racquet a little too high, or maybe they laze on the forehand for a split second, not moving their feet, and snap it back without much zip.
Suddenly this year, that’s all the opening Sinner needs to rush in and never look back.
He sprints to that short volley and hits it through the court. That soft ball that lands more than a few feet inside the baseline allows him to take control of the rally. A game goes from tied to 15-40 in an instant.
Then he wants to block a 130mph serve back to the feet, sending whoever comes, an informed Dimitrov or whoever, backs away and thinks they have to hit a miracle shot just to stay even, which they kind of do. And then they do the opposite.
By the end, they run into the back wall, as Dimitrov did late in Sunday’s second set to seal his fate.
“You see how focused he is now, how determined he is,” Dimitrov said of Sinner. “Can he play better? I do not know.”
Darren Cahill, one of Sinner’s coaches, says he absolutely can.
Both he and Sinner said this run of success is rooted in all the strength and endurance training Sinner has done over the past two years with Umberto Ferrara, his fitness coach. It allowed him to increase the speed of his strokes and his serve and play those long points that make him zigzag up and back and across the court, for 20 and 30 shots, and then restore the heart of the rhythm. down in the next 30 seconds so he can play another one.
Cahill has watched and coached some of the sport’s greatest players over the past 25 years – Andre Agassi, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Djokovic. He didn’t want to start comparing Sinner’s achievements to theirs “but the level is right there,” he said Sunday night.
What’s next? Probably a little more chaos.
Unlike many Italians before him, Sinner is not at his best on dirt. On Sunday night, a foam glass trophy sitting in front of him, he was already talking about his preparations for his first venue tournament, in Monte Carlo, Monaco – the principality in southern France where he lives.
Practice will begin Thursday, he said, with his first race a few days later. Maybe now he has the lungs to last during those long, physical rallies and dirt races, or maybe not. “Usually, I struggle there,” he said.
Perhaps the clay will slow him down, leaving the door open for Djokovic and Alcaraz to re-emerge. Nadal, who has only been playing for the past year and a half, is also lurking, recovering from hip surgery and a subsequent muscle tear in the same area and preparing, at nearly 38 years old, on the red clay where he has been for almost as long. intact.
And wouldn’t that just be the kind of chaos that has become the order of the day?
Or would it be a return to order?
In 2024, nothing in tennis is really that clear cut.
(Top photo: Frey/TPN/Getty Images)
