Jannik Sinner

#1On August 21, 2026, only days before the US Open, Jannik Sinner announced that he would not play.

#2That was strange enough for a world No. 1.

#3The numbers made it stranger.

#4Sinner was 44-3 for the season. He had won Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome and Wimbledon. At Wimbledon, he had defended his title. That final would turn out to be the last official match he played before New York.

#5He had not been losing his way down the rankings.

#6He had barely been losing at all.

#7The problem was his right knee.

#8Sinner had already skipped Montreal and Cincinnati while trying to recover. He still hoped to make the US Open. Back in Monte Carlo, he returned to the practice court and began testing the knee with his team.

#9It was not ready.

#10So for the first time since making his Grand Slam main-draw debut at the 2019 US Open, Sinner would miss a major entirely.

#11There is something oddly fitting about the problem, although not in the way a neat sports story might suggest.

#12As a child, Sinner once explained that one of the things he liked about tennis was that a mistake did not necessarily end everything.

#13There was usually another point.

#14Right now, there isn’t.

#15Sinner grew up in Sesto, a small town in the Dolomites near Italy’s northern border.

#16His father worked as a chef at a mountain lodge. His mother worked there too. Snow and mountains were simply part of life, and Sinner became a skier almost as naturally as he became anything else.

#17He was also very good at it.

#18Between roughly eight and twelve, he was one of Italy’s strongest young skiers in his age group. He competed seriously and won.

#19Tennis was different.

#20He played football too, and for years tennis was not even his first sporting priority. He might hit a few times a week, but he was hardly building his childhood around becoming a professional.

#21Then, around 13, Sinner made the decision that changed everything.

#22He stopped skiing seriously.

#23He chose tennis.

#24That choice looks obvious now only because we know what happened later. At the time, he was walking away from the sport in which he had already proved he could win.

#25Years later, Sinner gave several reasons.

#26Skiing had become mentally demanding. He had spent years waking up early, going into the cold and racing. He had won plenty there.

#27In tennis, he was still losing.

#28And there was something about that uncertainty he liked.

#29A ski race can be brutally final. You go down the mountain alone. One major mistake can ruin the run, and while you are racing you cannot look across the slope and adjust to what an opponent is doing.

#30Tennis gives you information.

#31You can see the opponent.

#32You know the score.

#33If something is going badly, the next point gives you a chance to change something.

#34Sinner picked the sport in which he was less accomplished.

#35Then he had to leave home to find out whether the choice would work.

#36Serious tennis training meant leaving Sesto.

#37Sinner moved to Bordighera, hours away from his family, to train in the system built around respected Italian coach Riccardo Piatti.

#38He was 13.

#39His parents did not move with him.

#40His friends stayed behind. So did skiing and football. Sinner had also grown up in German-speaking South Tyrol, so the move carried a cultural and linguistic adjustment along with everything else.

#41For a time, he lived with the family of coach Luka Cvjetković.

#42Suddenly, tennis was only part of what he had to learn.

#43He went to the supermarket.

#44He did laundry.

#45He cooked.

#46He cleaned up after himself.

#47Sinner later described the move as changing his life from one day to the next.

#48His parents had allowed it.

#49That matters because Hanspeter and Siglinde Sinner were not parents who had spent his childhood forcing a professional sports career onto him. Their son played several sports. He was allowed to choose.

#50Years later, after becoming a Grand Slam champion, Sinner kept returning to that freedom when he talked about them.

#51By 2026, he could also see the decision from the other side.

#52Leaving home had been hard for him, he said, but probably harder for his parents. A 13-year-old is thinking about the adventure ahead. His parents were the ones agreeing not to see their child grow up every day.

#53The gamble worked remarkably quickly.

#54But rising through tennis and finishing the biggest matches turned out to be two different problems.

#55Almost there, but unable to finish.

#56In 2019, Sinner was 17 and racing through the lower levels of professional tennis.

#57At a Challenger tournament in Alicante, he drew a 15-year-old Spaniard in the first round.

#58Carlos Alcaraz.

#59Their first meeting was not under the lights of a Grand Slam final. There was no world No. 1 ranking at stake and no global audience debating which one would define the next era of men’s tennis.

#60It was a Challenger first round.

#61Alcaraz won.

#62Over the next few years, both climbed fast, but Alcaraz opened some of the biggest doors first.

#63Sinner kept getting close.

#64At Wimbledon in 2022, he faced Djokovic in the quarterfinals and won the first two sets.

#65One more set would have put him through.

#66Djokovic came back and won in five.

#67A few months later at the US Open, Sinner met Alcaraz.

#68This time he got even closer.

#69Sinner held match point.

#70He could not finish it.

#71Alcaraz survived, the match stretched past five hours and finished at 2:50 in the morning, and Sinner lost.

#72Alcaraz went on to win the tournament.

#73Then he became the youngest No. 1 in ATP history.

#74The player Sinner had first met in a Challenger was suddenly showing him exactly how far ahead the sport could move.

#75Around the same period, Sinner made another uncomfortable decision.

#76He left Piatti.

#77This was not the usual story of a struggling player firing a coach because nothing was working. Piatti’s system had helped take Sinner from a 13-year-old prospect to the Top 10.

#78The system had worked.

#79Sinner left anyway.

#80Simone Vagnozzi became the central technical coach, and Darren Cahill later joined the team.

#81The changes they pursued were less dramatic than the idea of a player suddenly becoming “mentally tougher.”

#82They worked on the serve.

#83The return.

#84Coming forward.

#85The slice backhand.

#86The directions Sinner could find with his forehand.

#87They worked on his body too, because winning a Grand Slam often means surviving five-set tennis against the best players in the world.

#88And still, Sinner kept losing matches he almost had.

#89At Roland Garros in 2023, he faced Daniel Altmaier in the second round.

#90Sinner had two match points.

#91He lost both.

#92After five hours and 26 minutes, he was out.

#93There was no single coaching change that instantly fixed him.

#94But later that year, one match offered a different version of a familiar situation.

#95Late in 2023, Sinner beat Djokovic for the first time at the ATP Finals.

#96Djokovic then beat him in the final.

#97Days later, they met again in the Davis Cup semifinals.

#98Sinner was serving at 4-5 in the deciding set.

#99He fell behind 0-40.

#100Three consecutive match points for Djokovic.

#101This time Sinner was the player who needed to survive.

#102He saved the first.

#103Then the second.

#104Then the third.

#105And eventually he won.

#106It did not prove that Sinner had solved every problem under pressure. Tennis is rarely that clean.

#107But two months later, at the Australian Open, he found himself in another scene that looked suspiciously familiar.

#108Novak Djokovic was on the other side of the net.

#109Sinner won the first two sets.

#110Again.

#111In 2022 at Wimbledon, that had not been enough.

#112In Melbourne, Sinner even missed a match point in the third set and let Djokovic extend the match.

#113But this time he won the fourth.

#114He was in his first Grand Slam final.

#115Then Daniil Medvedev put him two sets behind.

#116Medvedev took the first set 6-3.

#117Then the second 6-3.

#118At one point, Sinner was down 1-5 in the second.

#119His first Grand Slam final looked like it might end before he had really found a way into it.

#120But the match began to change.

#121Medvedev could not maintain the same relentless attacking level forever. Rallies stretched out. Openings appeared. Sinner began finding better answers to the problems in front of him.

#122He won the third set 6-4.

#123Then the fourth 6-4.

#124In the fifth, Sinner got the break he needed.

#125On championship point, he drove a forehand that Medvedev could not return.

#126Sinner fell onto his back.

#127The child who had left the mountains at 13 was a Grand Slam champion.

#128It is tempting to make that the moment when an old weakness disappeared.

#129It didn’t.

#130Sinner would continue to have a poor record in five-set matches compared with the dominance he showed elsewhere. He would lose dramatic long matches again.

#131What changed was not that mistakes stopped happening.

#132Increasingly, he could make one and still find another solution before the match ended.

#133Months later, Sinner became world No. 1.

#134By then, though, a completely different problem had already begun behind closed doors.

#135During Indian Wells in March 2024, Sinner’s physiotherapist, Giacomo Naldi, had a cut on his finger.

#136Fitness trainer Umberto Ferrara had a spray called Trofodermin.

#137Naldi used it on the injury.

#138The spray contained clostebol, a banned anabolic steroid.

#139Naldi also treated and massaged Sinner.

#140Soon afterward, testing detected tiny amounts of a clostebol metabolite in Sinner’s samples.

#141Twice.

#142The explanation eventually accepted by the independent tribunal was accidental transdermal contamination: the banned substance had transferred through skin contact during treatment.

#143Sinner said he had not known that Naldi had used the spray.

#144He had not known that it contained clostebol.

#145Scientific experts accepted the proposed contamination route as plausible.

#146For months, almost nobody outside the case knew any of this was happening.

#147Automatic provisional suspensions were imposed after the positive tests, but Sinner appealed them. An independent tribunal chair lifted them while the case proceeded.

#148So publicly, Sinner continued playing.

#149He kept winning.

#150He reached No. 1.

#151Then, in August, the case became public.

#152Suddenly one of the calmest-looking players in tennis was at the center of one of the loudest arguments in the sport.

#153The independent tribunal found Sinner bore No Fault or Negligence.

#154It did not conclude that he had intentionally taken clostebol.

#155His explanation of accidental contamination was accepted.

#156But that was not the end.

#157Players began asking why Sinner had been allowed to keep competing while other athletes in anti-doping cases had spent long periods on the sidelines.

#158There was a procedural answer: Sinner had been provisionally suspended, appealed immediately and successfully convinced independent decision-makers to lift those suspensions.

#159That did not stop the perception problem.

#160Then WADA appealed.

#161Importantly, WADA was not arguing that Sinner had secretly taken clostebol to improve his performance.

#162It accepted that he had no intention to cheat, that the exposure gave him no performance benefit and that he did not know the substance had entered his system.

#163The dispute was narrower and, in some ways, more uncomfortable.

#164How responsible is an athlete for the negligence of the people working around him?

#165In February 2025, WADA and Sinner reached a settlement.

#166Sinner accepted a three-month period of ineligibility.

#167That solution produced another wave of criticism.

#168The suspension began after the Australian Open and ended before Roland Garros.

#169Sinner would miss no Grand Slam.

#170To critics, the timing looked remarkably convenient.

#171The argument was no longer simply about whether Jannik Sinner had doped.

#172It was about whether a system built around strict athlete responsibility was being applied fairly.

#173There was another consequence that legal language could not capture.

#174Ferrara and Naldi were members of Sinner’s inner team.

#175They helped take care of his body every day.

#176According to the accepted version of events, neither had set out to give Sinner a prohibited drug.

#177But their mistake had put his career in danger.

#178Sinner ended the working relationships.

#179He said he no longer felt confident continuing with them and that he needed “clean air.”

#180That phrase says something about how strange elite tennis can be.

#181A player cannot reach No. 1 entirely alone. He has to trust coaches, trainers and physiotherapists with his body and preparation.

#182Yet anti-doping rules ultimately put the athlete’s name on the result.

#183Sinner rebuilt the team.

#184Then, in February 2025, he actually stepped away from competition to serve the three-month suspension.

#185When he returned in May, his first tournament was at home in Rome.

#186He reached the final.

#187Carlos Alcaraz was waiting.

#188Alcaraz beat Sinner in the Rome final.

#189Then came Roland Garros.

#190For the first time, Sinner and Alcaraz met in a Grand Slam final.

#191Sinner won the opening set.

#192Then the second.

#193Alcaraz took the third, but in the fourth Sinner moved ahead again.

#194He led 5-3.

#195On Alcaraz’s serve, Sinner went up 0-40.

#196Three consecutive championship points.

#197One point would make him the Roland Garros champion.

#198Alcaraz saved the first.

#199Then the second.

#200Then the third.

#201The match kept going.

#202Five hours and 29 minutes after it began, Alcaraz won.

#203Sinner had been one point away from the title three different times.

#204Years earlier in New York, he had held match point against Alcaraz and lost.

#205Now he was a multiple Grand Slam champion and the world’s top player, and the same kind of defeat could still find him.

#206Thirty-five days later, they met in another Grand Slam final.

#207This time it was Wimbledon.

#208Alcaraz won the first set.

#209Sinner took the second.

#210Then the third.

#211Then he moved toward the finish again.

#212Championship point arrived.

#213Paris was barely more than a month old.

#214This time Sinner finished it.

#215He was the Wimbledon champion.

#216Afterward, he did not pretend the Roland Garros defeat had simply vanished from his mind. He talked about trying to understand what had gone wrong there, going back to work and learning from it.

#217That does not mean one painful loss magically caused the next title.

#218But the two scenes sit unusually close together.

#219Paris: three championship points, none converted.

#220London: championship point again, this one finished.

#221By then, Sinner and Alcaraz were no longer simply two young stars who happened to play each other often.

#222They were starting to alter each other’s careers.

#223Alcaraz had broken through first.

#224He won a major first.

#225He became No. 1 first.

#226Cahill later said that watching a player from the same generation achieve those things helped push Sinner to become more professional and physically stronger.

#227Sinner had to build a body capable of surviving the biggest matches.

#228Then the direction of influence changed.

#229As Sinner became more dominant, Alcaraz began talking openly about training with Sinner in mind.

#230How do I beat Jannik?

#231What does he expose in my game?

#232What has to improve?

#233They did not need to dislike each other for the rivalry to work.

#234Sinner has said that competing in huge matches does not mean they have to be enemies away from the court.

#235The tension is more interesting than that.

#236Off the court, there is respect.

#237On the court, each has become a problem the other has to solve.

#238In 2025, they met in the final of Roland Garros.

#239Then Wimbledon.

#240Then the US Open.

#241Three consecutive Grand Slam finals between the same two men, an Open Era first.

#242Alcaraz won in Paris.

#243Sinner won in London.

#244Alcaraz won in New York and took the No. 1 ranking with him.

#245At the ATP Finals, Sinner beat him again.

#246There was no clean ending.

#247Then 2026 began, and for a while it looked as if Sinner might simply leave everyone behind.

#248Sinner won Indian Wells.

#249Then Miami.

#250Then Monte Carlo.

#251Madrid.

#252Rome.

#253He was piling up Masters titles and separating himself at the top of the rankings.

#254There was one spectacular interruption.

#255At Roland Garros, Juan Manuel Cerundolo came back from two sets down to beat Sinner in the second round as the world No. 1 struggled in severe heat.

#256It could have looked like the beginning of a collapse.

#257It wasn’t.

#258At Wimbledon, Sinner reached the final again.

#259This time the opponent was Alexander Zverev.

#260Sinner won.

#261Back-to-back Wimbledon titles.

#262His sixth trophy of the season.

#263A 44-3 record.

#264When Sinner actually stepped onto a match court in 2026, defeating him had become an extremely rare event.

#265Then he stopped stepping onto match courts.

#266After Wimbledon, Sinner’s right knee kept him out of Montreal.

#267Then Cincinnati.

#268He still wanted to make New York.

#269So he returned to practice in Monte Carlo and tried to see whether the body would cooperate.

#270It did not cooperate enough.

#271On August 21, he withdrew from the US Open.

#272New York has marked several stages of Sinner’s career.

#273It was the site of his first Grand Slam main draw in 2019.

#274In 2022, it was where he held match point against Alcaraz and lost one of the longest, latest-finishing matches in tournament history.

#275In 2024, he arrived just after the clostebol case became public and left with the trophy.

#276In 2025, Alcaraz beat him there for both the title and the No. 1 ranking.

#277In 2026, Sinner could not get there at all.

#278That is not the same kind of choice he made at 13.

#279Back then, he walked away from skiing because he wanted tennis.

#280Now he wants to play tennis and has to wait.

#281There is no evidence yet that his knee injury was caused by the packed schedule, and no one can say from the information available whether this will become a long-term turning point in his career.

#282The plan is rehabilitation, with Beijing and Shanghai as targets for a possible return.

#283Targets, not guarantees.

#284When Sinner explained why tennis appealed to him as a boy, part of the attraction was that the game kept giving him information.

#285You see the opponent.

#286You see the score.

#287You lose a point and, if the match is still alive, you can try something different on the next one.

#288His career has given him plenty of those moments.

#289He failed to close matches.

#290He changed coaches.

#291He failed again.

#292He found his first Grand Slam.

#293He became No. 1.

#294A contamination inside his own team turned into a global anti-doping controversy.

#295He served a suspension, came back, lost three championship points to Alcaraz, then beat him at Wimbledon five weeks later.

#296He kept finding another point.

#297For now, the problem is different.

#298Alcaraz is not standing across the net.

#299Neither is Djokovic.

#300Neither is Zverev.

#301There is not even a score yet.

#302Before Jannik Sinner can work out what to do on the next point, his knee has to let him play one.

#303- Carlos Alcaraz — How did Sinner and Alcaraz become rivals who keep changing the way each other trains and plays? - Novak Djokovic — How did Sinner finally learn to beat the opponent who once kept turning his biggest leads into losses? - Riccardo Piatti — Why did 13-year-old Sinner leave the coaching system that had helped build him into a Top 10 player?