The near-total domination of men’s tennis by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic for close to two decades has had two unfortunate fallouts.
Multiple generations of accomplished players, from Jo-Wilfried Tsonga to Tomas Berdych to David Ferrer to Kei Nishikori to Kevin Anderson, have all been judged against immeasurably high standards before being deemed inadequate and also-rans.
Even those who won Grand Slam tournaments, like Andy Murray, Stan Wawrinka, Marin Cilic and Juan Martin Del Potro, have been given the short shrift, for they didn’t reach double-digit figures, and only grudgingly been admitted into the sport’s elite.
Breeding boredom
At the same time, the unparalleled consistent excellence of the Big Three has bred a certain kind of boredom. Though they are still immensely popular and universally loved, tennis fans have been desperate for new heroes to emerge. So much so that the sport and its followers have been all too eager to arrange a hurried coronation only for the king in waiting to not look the part.
In recent times, Carlos Alcaraz has bucked the trend, notching up two Majors in quick succession, including Wimbledon 2023 with a sensational five-set triumph in the final over Djokovic. There is now heightened hope that Italian Jannik Sinner, already up to No. 4 in the world, will be the next shining light.
The prime driver of this conversation is the run the 22-year-old went on during the fall of 2023. Sinner won his maiden ATP Masters 1000 trophy in Toronto, added titles in Beijing and Vienna (both ATP 500s), finished a worthy runner-up to Djokovic at the ATP Finals at home in Turin and led Italy to its first Davis Cup triumph since 1976.
Over a three-month period after the US Open, he beat Alcaraz once, Djokovic twice and Daniil Medvedev thrice. The pulsating three-set victory over Djokovic in the ATP Finals’ round-robin stage, in fact, snapped the Serb’s 19-match winning streak on the Tour stretching back to the Cincinnati Masters.
By the end of the year, Sinner had won 13 matches against top-10 players — nine of those between September and November — the most in a season for anyone other than Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray since Lleyton Hewitt’s 13 victories in 2001.
“It’s been remarkable to watch his growth in the last two years,” Jim Courier, a former World No. 1 and four-time Major titlist, told Tennis Channel Inside-In podcast. “He has improved his movement and he is a much better defence-to-offence player than he ever was, especially from the forehand corner.
“He has toggled his serve for a year and a half, and that has improved mightily as well. He has got the power off the forehand and the backhand. He is ambitious and he’s going to be a real problem for everybody going forward.”
Slow burn, not explosive
Sinner’s rapid growth in the last few months may give the impression of him being in a tearing hurry to join the sport’s upper echelons, but his rise has been more slow-burn and meticulous as compared to the explosive ascent of Alcaraz.
In 2019, as an 18-year-old, the Italian won the ATP Next Gen Finals in Milan — the marquee competition for the game’s best 21-and-under players. In 2020, he reached his maiden Slam quarterfinal at Roland-Garros, and the next year he made his first Masters final (Miami) and entered the ATP top-10. In 2022, he advanced to the quarterfinals of the other three Majors and even held a match-point against eventual champion Alcaraz at the US Open. At Wimbledon 2023, he graduated further, debuting in a Slam semifinal.
“I’m the kind of player who needs just a little bit of time,” Sinner said in an interview last year. “To live these moments, to play in centre courts, to play against the best players in the world in important moments or in the final stages of the tournaments. Last year [2022], I made a lot of quarterfinals and this year I made a lot of semifinals and finals. I’m taking good steps forward, which is the most important thing.”
A big reason for Sinner’s progress can be attributed to the changes he effected in his coaching team in 2022. Darren Cahill — a fine tennis mind who has in the past coached Andre Agassi, Lleyton Hewitt and Simona Halep to Grand Slam titles — joined his full-time coach Simone Vagnozzi.
The duo’s influence is perhaps best seen in the way Sinner has spruced up his serve. At 6’2”, he already has the height advantage, and a modification in his service motion — by bringing his feet closer before the jump — in the middle of last season has made his opening shot more lethal and effective.
According to Tennis Data Innovations, a joint venture between ATP Tour and ATP Media, Sinner’s serve quality went up from 7.8 (Jan-June) to 8.1 (June-Oct), with increases in height (2.85m to 2.87), average speed (121 mph to 122) and percentage of serves in (58 to 59).
Though incremental, the shifts here seemingly produced a substantial enhancement in the quality of the shot on break-points, where he landed 63.5% as against 53.5 earlier, and thus saved 74% of break-points (vs. 66) and won 88% of his service games (vs. 84%).
In December 2023, tennis podcaster Alex Gruskin quantified this further. By mining 33 seasons’ datasets since 1991 from Tennis Abstract, a blog run by analyst Jeff Sackman, Gruskin concluded that Sinner (2023) ranked fifth in hold percentage.
Elite underlying metrics
But astoundingly, Sinner was also fourth in break percentage — a measure of the return game — which helped him join an exclusive grouping of four other legends (Agassi, Djokovic, Nadal and Federer) to have featured in the top-five in both.
“Jannik is incredibly competitive — whether we’re playing cards or on the go-karts, or doing anything outside of tennis, he wants to win, and win badly,” Cahill, who was adjudged the ATP Coach of the year for 2023 along with Vagnozzi, told ATPTour.com last September.
“I think at times he’s more concerned with taking five Euros off me than he is about winning a $20,000 paycheque, and takes great satisfaction when he sees me taking it out of the wallet to give it to him.”
All of this suggests that as Sinner kickstarts his 2024 campaign at the Australian Open, the expectation for him to make a deep run and sow the seeds for sport’s next era-defining rivalry with Alcaraz isn’t misplaced. Building on a hot streak in the fall is always tricky, for there is no Major to peak at and there is a break in momentum during the off-season. But confidence is something Sinner will surely carry.
“In 2024, I would like to win my first Slam but I don’t forget the Masters 1000s, that also matters so much,” Sinner told la Repubblica recently. “I want to stabilise my ranking and absolutely return to Turin for the ATP Finals. The Olympic Games are on my calendar, and it will be very special to return to Roland-Garros for the Olympics.”
