In early June, Jannik Sinner suffered the sort of defeat that could cause years of psychological damage. He squandered three match points in the fourth set of the French Open final, before losing a fifth-set tiebreak to his nearest and only rival at the top of tennis, Carlos Alcaraz.
So he went home. Sinner retreated to Sesto, the tiny Alpine village in northwest Italy where he was raised, seeking the comfort of his family. His parents and his grandfather still live there.
Five weeks later, Sinner won Wimbledon, beating Alcaraz after dropping a first set that Alcaraz had won with the kind of impossible stolen point that he has used to crush the spirits of opponents, including Sinner. A Wimbledon title is the kind of life-changing triumph that has sent previous winners’ heads and hearts into the clouds. Sinner, a tall and handsome 24-year-old who has already amassed a nine-figure fortune in prize money and endorsement deals, could satisfy nearly any desire with a few taps of his phone.
He went home.
Sinner slept in his brother’s old bedroom because his is filled with other stuff now. He went for walks. He played cards and board games with his close relatives and played some golf with his dad, when his father didn’t have to work at the local restaurant where he is a chef. He caught up with some old friends and drove around the picturesque mountain roads.
“We take success and defeat the same way,” Sinner said in a rare one-on-one interview at the Cincinnati Open earlier this month. “The most important thing is that we are healthy, that we are having a nice time together.”
He paused for a moment, before noting the obvious.
“Of course everyone is more happy if I win,” he said.
“But at the same time, even if I lose, they’re happy that I come back, that I want to see them, that I have a great time with my friends, and people I really, really care about. So it was something very, very nice in both ways.
“I believe in important moments to come back home to see the people I love.”
Over the years, the kings and queens of tennis have assumed all sorts of identities. Club-hopping partiers. Celebrity titans who enjoy rubbing shoulders with the royalty of fashion and finance. Sinner appears dead-set on the identity that appears to come naturally to him, at least for now.
He desperately just wants to remain a simple guy from a simple family, the son of a cook and a waitress and the brother of a firefighting instructor, who more often than not — and even when he’s let a Grand Slam slip through his fingers — finds his way toward a kind of amenable stoicism.
“We always speak about the champion mentality, you know,” Sinner’s main coach, Simone Vagnozzi, said during a recent interview. “The champion’s mentality is going out in the difficult situation.”
Last August, Sinner went out to New York in the most difficult situation of his career. The tennis anti-doping authorities had just announced what appeared to be the conclusion of an anti-doping investigation into Sinner, after he twice tested positive for clostebol, a banned anabolic steroid, in March 2024.
An independent tribunal convened by the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) accepted the explanation that Sinner’s physiotherapist, Giacomo Naldi, used a first-aid cream containing the substance on a cut finger, then gave Sinner massages through which he contaminated the player. It ruled that Sinner bore “no fault or negligence” for the two positive tests, as well as finding that he did not intentionally dope.
That announcement went public a few hours before Sinner’s plane touched down in New York City. He headed to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to face players and journalists seeking an explanation of what had been going on in secret during the first five months of Sinner’s reign atop the sport. Sinner continued to play because he quickly and successfully appealed the provisional suspension that he received for each positive test, in line with ITIA protocol.
A U.S. Open media official tried to shut down questions during his opening news conference. There was uproar. Sinner overruled him and tried to explain what had transpired. Two weeks later, when he won the tournament, he spoke of the dark journey the tournament had been, a struggle more than a triumph. Still, it appeared to be over.
It was not. The World Anti-Doping Agency appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport and sought what would have been a career-derailing ban of two years, arguing that Sinner should bear responsibility for having an illegal substance in his system, even though it agreed that he did not intentionally dope. Sinner’s tennis future remained in jeopardy for six months, even as he won the season-ending ATP Tour Finals, the Davis Cup, and the Australian Open.
In the end, WADA reached a case resolution agreement with the Italian. Sinner received a three-month ban, which he did not want to accept, between the end of the Australian Open in January and the start of the Italian Open in May. He returned to a hero’s welcome, met tennis fan Pope Leo just days after his elevation, and got on with winning tennis matches when just about anyone not named Alcaraz stood on the other side of the net.
Then, five weeks after Alcaraz completed the epic Roland Garros comeback that solidified their rivalry as the apotheosis of men’s tennis, Sinner beat him on Centre Court at Wimbledon, the sport’s grandest stage. He arrives in New York about as far removed from 2024 as he could be.
Jannik Sinner responded to his French Open dejection by winning Wimbledon five weeks later. (Franck Arland / Getty Images)
“Last year was a much more stressful situation because of the timing before a Grand Slam. It was difficult to handle everything. Also for me, you know, I’m still young, so it was not easy,” he said in a news conference on Friday.
He could say he used to dream that his life might be like this, but that would be a lie. In the tiny mountain town of Sesto, Sinner the boy never bothered to dream of something so ridiculous as being a Wimbledon champion. And don’t look for his parents in New York. They’re back home in Italy, at work.
“Too far, too busy,” he says.
He says this in the most commonsensical way, even though the parents of so many other stars always find their way into their children’s courtside boxes and onto television screens. Sinner’s dad, Hanspeter, missed the French Open final. He has many shifts at the restaurant where he works during the last weeks of the summer tourist season in the Dolomites.
His mother, Siglinde, no longer waits tables but manages a few small apartments his family owns. She was courtside during his run to the finals in Rome, Paris, and, thankfully, London. She has become something of an avatar of the Sinner experience in recent months, watching her son endure the most stressful moments of his on-court career. Sinner is the duck’s back, water sliding off; Siglinde is the feet whirring below the surface, shock and awe etched on her face.
She had promised to come if he ever played a final in Europe, though she finds it so stressful that she prefers to watch on television. After he dropped the first set in his semifinal against Tommy Paul at the Italian Open, she had to leave the stadium.
Sinner says he has pleaded with her to maintain her perspective, which is really his. It’s just a tennis match, he tells her. The worst thing that can happen is that he loses. They still get to live this unbelievably fortunate existence the next day.
It’s the sort of message the parent is supposed to deliver to the child, not the other way around. In some ways, the French Open loss may have been the exact kind of exposure therapy his mother needed.
“That’s the worst thing that happens,” Sinner said. Then a deep breath and a shake of the head. “Parents, I guess.”
One day, perhaps, they will come around to his way of thinking. “You cannot live this sport stressfully for 20 years, 15 years. So I always said, we are good, we’re healthy, I’m playing the biggest tennis match in this moment. So even if I lose, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win.”
Sinner wasn’t always so zen about his results. He did not always possess that tennis poker face, where it’s nearly impossible to tell whether he’s putting on one of his absurd ballstriking clinics or having one of his once-in-a-blue-moon off days. There was a time around his mid-teens, when he was first starting to play professional matches and losing a lot of them, that he took the defeats hard, sometimes losing his temper when his game would unravel.
He knew why. His parents were spending just about every extra euro they had on his tennis development, and they didn’t have many extra euros. Worse, he knew how hard they worked. Restaurant work is not for the faint of heart: his dad, on his feet in a hot kitchen all day and into the night; his mother on her feet, in and out of that hot kitchen, all day and into the night. On a good day during his childhood, Sinner would see them for a couple of hours.
“They were tired, and I had to sleep early because I had school,” he said.
All of a sudden, he was traveling around, losing tennis matches and their money. His parents never complained, but he hated what was happening.
Everything changed, he said, when he was 18. He won enough matches, including the ATP Next Gen Finals, a year-end tournament for the most promising players under 21, to break into the top 100. Now he had his own money to spend on his career.
The next year, he made the quarterfinals of the French Open. Money has never been a concern since. Given the lengthy list of blue-chip endorsement deals, with a combined reported value in the hundreds of millions and nearly $50 million in prize money, it should never be again, assuming he doesn’t lose it all on the golf course to his other coach, Darren Cahill.
They play often. Cahill is the far superior golfer, so superior that he allows Vagnozzi and Sinner to team up and gives them a stroke on every hole. Sinner and Vagnozzi also get to play scramble style, which means they play both their balls from the better location on each shot, and record the best score on each hole.
Sinner and Vagnozzi recorded a rare win earlier this month in Mason, Ohio, where the Cincinnati Open is held. Cahill said that whatever grace and composure Sinner usually shows on the tennis court went out the window on the final green of the day, as he danced around with his arms in the air like he’d won The Masters.
“It was actually funny,” Sinner says. “I never played like this.”
Needless to say, he does not rate himself as much of a golfer. Cahill, who has been playing the game for decades, has been trying to teach him. He describes Sinner as eminently coachable and willing to embrace a change, sometimes even in the middle of a match, though it’s safe to say he’s had more success on the tennis court than the links. He has convinced his charge to embrace a data-driven approach to improving his game.
Cahill was at the forefront of embracing analytics in tennis. He has said it was his not-very-secret weapon when he was helping Lleyton Hewitt, Andre Agassi, and Simona Halep reach the No. 1 ranking.
He, Sinner and Vagnozzi embarked on a long-term process of gaining more power on his serve, more topspin on his forehand, and more variety on his backhand. Sinner used to almost always hit his backhand crosscourt. Opponents knew what was coming.
During the past year, he said, Sinner’s ability to pull the trigger on a backhand down the line has been a complete game-changer. They use the data to study opponents, too, with Cahill combing tendencies the evening before a match, then boiling down his findings to a 10 to 15-minute chat.
Before a recent match in Cincinnati against the rising Canadian Gabriel Diallo, they noticed that Diallo struggled when opponents returned his second serve from inside the baseline, even when they attacked his forehand, which is Diallo’s strength. Sinner followed the plan and Diallo made error after error on his stronger side
“It’s always in the numbers,” Cahill said. “Sometimes they just don’t make sense at the time. You have to trust your gut a little bit as a tennis player. You have to be right in the moment.”
After the famous loss to Alcaraz in Paris, Sinner, Vagnozzi and Cahill spoke about how Sinner could have been slightly more courageous in the big moments, even as he and Alcaraz played at a ridiculously high level through the final set and into the sixth hour of the match. Then they moved on.
“It’s tennis, it is a game and you have to enjoy it,” Vagnozzi said. “To lose in the final like this, to be part of an unbelievable match, was something good in the end. It was not just bad, and for us, the goal is to give the 100 percent that we have.
“So we went away from Paris with, not a smile for sure, but we knew that we gave 100 percent, so it was in peace.”
And then they went back to work, preparing for the grass. They focused heavily on raising the quality of Sinner’s running forehand, something Alcaraz exploited throughout the French Open final.
That made sense to Sinner, because the grass rewards a big forehand more than the slow clay, the ball sliding through the slick court as Sinner skis down mountains. It worked. Alcaraz kept trying to break the sideline on Sinner’s forehand side and drag him off the court. Sinner responded with crackerjack balls down the line and on sharp angles.
Even the point in which he conceded the first set, thanks to the absurdly low backhand slice pickup that Alcaraz has made his trademark on the grass, included a running forehand that would have taken most players out of the rally.
“We always have to improve because people, they catch up,” Sinner said. “They know how I play now.”
They know how he lives, too. Win or lose, he will be back in Sesto before too long.
(Top photo: Claudio Lavenia / GC Images)
