How swapping ski slopes for tennis courts has paid off for Jannik Sinner
Tennis has a new sensation. His fans dress up as carrots and he could easily have found fame hurtling down Alpine pistes. But who exactly is Jannik Sinner? Apart from the man who finally ended Novak Djokovic’s Melbourne reign after six unbeaten years, that is.
The first answer – as was evident from the on-court interview that followed Friday’s shock result – is that Sinner is a very un-Italian Italian.
Think of his compatriots, and you would usually come up with Adriano Panatta, Matteo Berrettini or Fabio Fognini: all very dark, handsome and charismatic. Sinner is so pale that he probably needs to wear factor 50 on a cloudy English day. He has a shock of bright red hair – hence the carrot impersonators – and generally resembles Fido Dido, the 1980s cartoon character.
Like Andreas Seppi – another anomalous Italian who once beat Roger Federer at this event – Sinner hails from South Tyrol: a German-speaking state in north-eastern Italy which feels as though it would make more sense as part of Austria.
Up until the age of 12, Sinner was a serious skiing prospect who idolised the American downhill champion Bode Miller and once finished as runner-up in a national giant slalom race for juniors. His phenomenal balance is reminiscent of Djokovic, who grew up in the Serbian mountain resort of Kopaonik and is also an accomplished skier.
Sinner was 13 when he left his hometown of Innichen – otherwise known as San Candido – to train with the legendary development coach Riccardo Piatti on the Italian Riviera.
It cannot have been an easy decision, but it has certainly paid off. As Sinner has explained: “Skiing is just one-and-a-half minutes down the hill. If you make one mistake, the whole thing is over. In tennis you can make some mistakes but still win. This is why I chose tennis.”
At 22, Sinner remains understated in interviews, especially by comparison with flamboyant compatriots like Fognini. After his mesmerising performance against Djokovic on Friday, one might have expected him to be bubbling over with excitement. Instead, he addressed on-court interviewer Jim Courier in a flat monotone that felt reminiscent of the young Andy Murray.
As with Murray, though, there is a sense of humour lurking beneath that droning voice. A couple of hours after Sinner’s win, his two-man coaching team dropped into the interview room to discuss his recent surge. Sinner himself popped his head around the door to ask “How is it to coach Jannik?”
Questioned later about Sinner’s geographical origins, his Italian coach Simone Vagnozzi replied: “For sure it’s a different part of Italy. I think this part of Italy normally is really serious. They don’t speak so much. And from the outside maybe you see this with Jannik, but in reality is a guy who wants to make a joke, wants to have a smile always.
“It’s really serious on the court when he practises,” Vagnozzi added, “and this is maybe the German part of him. But he is also really funny, and this is more Italian part.”
And so to Sunday’s final. We are about to witness a tennis rarity: a new name inscribed on the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup. The last time this happened was in 2014, when Stan Wawrinka gatecrashed the Djokovic/Federer/Nadal triopoly that otherwise stretches back to 2005.
On Sunday, Sinner’s opponent will be 27-year-old Daniil Medvedev, the eccentric Russian who has already played five major finals. Unfortunately for him, three of these have come against Djokovic and two against Nadal, so his conversion rate is extremely low. But he did at least manage to nip in and seize his lone grand-slam title at the 2022 US Open, when an exhausted Djokovic hit an emotional wall.
Despite the sizeable experience gap – Sinner has never made it this far in a major before – most bookmakers are quoting Sinner as the slight favourite. He simply has more firepower than the metronomic Medvedev. And he applied it at the end of last season, overturning a previously dismal head-to-head by beating Medvedev three times in the space of six weeks. The defining image was of a 100mph forehand, struck down the line by a rampaging Sinner, that had his laconic Australian coach Darren Cahill chuckling in disbelief.
Over the last year, Cahill and Vagnozzi have introduced more variety to Sinner’s game, while also remodelling his serve. One area that required no tinkering is his thunderous power off the ground. “The sound of the ball when he hits it, it’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” said Cahill, who has already worked with three world No1s in Lleyton Hewitt, Andre Agassi and Simona Halep.
“Agassi hits the ball like that,” Cahill added. “Rafa was exactly the same. Roger, when he hit a forehand, you could just hear the sound of it. And Novak, when he hits a forehand and backhand, it’s like a thud. All those players have a different sound when they hit the ball, and Jannik certainly has that as well.”
As Djokovic nears his 37th birthday, Sinner and the 20-year-old Spanish prodigy Carlos Alcaraz are poised to inherit the tennis world. Where Alcaraz is the magician with a very Latin sense of flair, Sinner has a coldness about his machine-tooled game.
Their rivalry – which includes an absolute barn-burner at the 2022 US Open – is well balanced to date, with Sinner leading by four wins to three. But he still lags behind in the grand slam-title stakes, by two to zero. Success against Medvedev would cut the deficit in half.
