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The Sporting Scene


JANNIK SINNER SOARS WITH COURAGE AT THE AUSTRALIAN OPEN

In Sunday’s final, the champion waited out Daniil Medvedev’s unplayable hot
streak, then took control.

By Louisa Thomas

January 28, 2024
Jannik Sinner came into this year’s final having dropped only a set.Photograph
by Daniel Pockett / Getty

Save this storySave this story
Save this storySave this story

Jannik Sinner was once a skiing prodigy. He grew up in a small town in the
Italian Alps, near Austria, and was one of the country’s top prospects in the
giant slalom, an event that requires speed, quick feet, and technical mastery.
But he was afraid. Skiing is unforgiving: one small mistake, and you lose the
race, or worse. So, when he was around thirteen, Sinner turned more seriously to
tennis. He has been asked many times what skills skiing gave him, and he answers
modestly: a sense of balance, a feel for sliding on the court. But sometimes he
is more direct. “When I was a skier, I was always aware that I could hurt myself
badly,” he told Interview, last May. “In tennis you can break an ankle, but you
can’t die.”

I thought of that as I watched Sinner hoist the trophy after beating Daniil
Medvedev, 3–6, 3–6, 6–4, 6–4, 6–3, in an astounding—and yet
unsurprising—comeback at the Australian Open final on Sunday. Fear often decides
a tennis match, or more precisely nerves. Perhaps more so in this sport than any
other, you can see a physiological response to pressure: it tightens the body,
rewires the mind. Sinner came onto the court against Medvedev and played nervy
tennis to start, hesitant where he would normally be quick. He’d gone down two
sets in barely an hour, typically an insurmountable lead. But what was there to
fear, really?

In 2020, aged nineteen, he played Rafael Nadal in the French Open quarterfinals.
There was no shame in loss. He announced himself in the sound of his shot, as
pure a crack as there is in the sport. His timing on the ball—a function of his
vision, his footwork, and his ability to bring his hands behind the ball—was
immaculate. His long legs moved with a glider’s grace, and his long arm had the
looseness of a whip. As with most players, his forehand was the wing on which he
piled up winners, but his two-handed backhand was a revelation—his quick hands
let him bring his backswing so far behind him that, when he uncurled to meet the
ball, he hit it with the heavy speed and topspin of a forehand. It was easy to
guess that, along with Carlos Alcaraz, he represented the future of tennis—they
both had an attacking mentality, combined with a shocking ability to cover the
court at long distances and extreme angles—completely erasing the typical
distinction between offense and defense. They stretched the usual dimensions of
the court. “Courage” was the word that people used to describe them then, not
only for the way they took risks but also for the brave way they struck the
ball. Their match at the 2022 U.S. Open was—Big Three, forgive me—one of the
finest tennis matches I’ve ever seen.

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But Sinner lost that match, and as Alcaraz ascended to the top ranking Sinner
slipped. His serve was relatively harmless, and became a weakness. He seemed to
lack versatility, unlike Alcaraz, who constantly innovated with his feel and
touch. Sinner’s smoothness started to seem like sameness. And there was, if not
fear, then nerves. He made the semifinals at Wimbledon, but lost to Novak
Djokovic, meekly, after running up a two-set lead. His ranking fell out of the
Top Ten, down to No. 15. During a changeover in China, after the U.S. Open, he
puked in a bucket, hitting a new low, seemingly. But he won that match, then
beat Alcaraz in the semifinal, then won the title. It was the start of a
remarkable run, during which he played Djokovic three times in two weeks and
beat him twice.

There had been signs that this could come. Most notable, he’d overhauled his
service motion, shifting from a platform stance to sliding his feet together,
what is known in tennis as a pinpoint stance, sacrificing stability for the
ability to reach higher and rotate faster—basic physics for a faster serve. He’d
become more aggressive about coming into the net and using his spin to play with
a bit more margin. And he was gaining in confidence. Beating Djokovic will do
that to you.



But it is another thing entirely to do that at the Australian Open, which
Djokovic has won ten times, and where Djokovic was 20–0 in semifinals and
finals. But, in this year’s semifinal, Sinner dominated Djokovic, as he had
everyone else. Sinner came into the final having dropped only a set. His
opponent, Medvedev, had spent nearly six hours more than him on the court. Three
of Medvedev’s six matches so far had gone into the fifth set. In two of them,
he’d had to come back from two sets down. Sinner had every reason to feel like
the favorite, except he was playing in his first major final and Medvedev was in
his sixth. So far in the tournament, Sinner had been dominating short points,
while Medvedev had had the clear edge only in very long rallies—nine shots or
more—which are quite rare and much harder on legs that are already gone.

Medvedev seems to revel in the suffering: extending points, games, sets,
matches; hitting off-balance shots. Even his normal ground strokes can look like
mishits, wobbling his racquet as the ball blazes back flat and low. The surprise
of the match was how aggressively Medvedev played at the start. In the first
set, he made nineteen of his twenty-two first serves, played unusually close to
the baseline, and ended points quickly with winners. But Sinner had the fresher
legs and knew it. Sometimes what we call courage is simply a measure of high
stakes. Sometimes it is something else, a sense of joy that comes with making a
hard choice. That was Sinner on Sunday: waiting out Medvedev’s unplayable hot
streak, then taking control. He won the next two sets, tiring Medvedev with long
baseline rallies. Then it was Medvedev—who’d already lost one Australian Open
from two sets up, against Nadal—who looked haunted, or at least very tired.
Sinner consistently baited Medvedev by pulling him into midcourt, only to push
him back. Medvedev, a counterpuncher at heart, complied by retreating. Sinner
won the match, finally, with an emphatic forehand down the line. That was the
promise of tennis right there—the chance to make mistakes and to learn from
playing, to find some freedom in the feeling of running and hitting a ball. What
are the stakes, after all? Following the match, even Medvedev had some
perspective. “It always hurts to lose in the final,” he said, “but probably to
lose in the final is better than losing before.” ♦






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Louisa Thomas, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of three books,
including “Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams.”

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