Nick Kyrgios just wants to speak his truth, man. He does, after all, have his own podcast to go along with his blue tick on X, where he is not afraid to add a hot take or two to the big topics. It’s hardly a new development. Among his fellow professionals on the tour, the divisive and disruptive Australian has always possessed one of the louder voices in the room.
Kyrgios may have been sidelined by injury for the past 18 months – and is now a fresh doubt for the upcoming Australian Open after pulling out of an exhibition match yesterday due to an abdominal strain – but his opinions, including his forthright view that the Pyramids were not built by humans, have not diminished, nor has his capacity to spout them. Instead, he has been magnified, holding a megaphone towards his newfound calling of righteousness. The self-proclaimed “troublemaker” of tennis has rebranded as its moral protector.
Or, rather, Kyrgios has found a target, and there is no bigger target than those at the top. In a year where both the men’s and women’s world number ones, Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek, tested positive for banned substances but were found to bear no significant fault, Kyrgios has been unrelenting in his criticism.
Plenty of current and former players have been critical of the process that allowed both Sinner and Swiatek’s cases to be kept confidential until the outcomes were determined and have questioned a supposed “two-tier” approach to doping violations. Yet no player has been as committed to that criticism as Kyrgios.
Kyrgios is controversial but he is also free to have his opinion. When news of Sinner’s positive tests for an anabolic steroid was released in August, the Australian made his stance perfectly clear in a tweet that called for a two-year ban, regardless of whether Sinner’s violation was intentional or not. But, by stating that Sinner’s performance was enhanced, his post was flagged for containing false or misleading information.
If that signalled an inauspicious start to Kyrgios’s campaign, things went downhill when the 29-year-old aimed a misogynistic tweet at Sinner’s girlfriend, the Russian player Anna Kalinskaya. Before Sinner’s appearance in the US Open final, which the Australian covered as a pundit for ESPN, Kyrgios commented “second serve” below an old photo of himself and Kalinskaya at a basketball game.
Somewhere, between calling for a clean sport and making childish and degrading comments about a former girlfriend, a line appeared to have been crossed. Kyrgios, though, has picked his side, doubling down in his opposition while Sinner has gone on to win more major titles in an increasingly dominant fashion.
More recently, ahead of the Australian Open, Kyrgios reacted to the sight of the Italian having a practice session with Cruz Hewitt, the teenage son of former Wimbledon champion and world No 1 Lleyton Hewitt, by commenting with a series of needle emojis on the 16-year-old’s picture with Sinner. “Love ya Cruz but this is wild,” Kyrgios said. It may just be a joke, but the extent of his objection has almost reached the point where if Sinner endorsed Krygios’s favourite brand of ice cream, it feels as if he would have to make a point of abstaining.
But Kyrgios’s campaign has meant that he has remained in the spotlight, even at a time when he has appeared on more episodes of his ‘Good Trouble’ podcast than played matches since reaching the quarter-finals of the US Open in September 2023. Kyrgios has hardly been starved of a platform elsewhere, though. While unable to compete due to a wrist injury, the BBC, Discovery, ESPN and Channel 7 all employed a man who, in February 2023, pleaded guilty to assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
Kyrgios’s TV punditry was largely insightful and was notably delivered in a different tone to his social media postings. Online, a man who was forced to distance himself from the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate before working for the BBC has positioned himself as a disruptor, where the polarising opinions are the ones that garner the most attention.
Within that, and the ever-toxic space of tennis discourse on social media, Kyrgios has gained an element of support by standing as Sinner and Swiatek’s fiercest critic. He has become the de facto leader of one of the two sides, to the point where Sinner’s fans flood his own comments with carrot emojis and GIFs of the Italian lifting the US Open trophy. For what it is worth, the 23-year-old Sinner has avoided fanning the flames any further by not commenting on Kyrgios’s criticisms.
Meanwhile, if Kyrgios is able to return at the Australian Open, there is a possibility he may be drawn to play Sinner in the early rounds. Were it to happen, a move from the Kyrgios playbook would provoke as big a blockbuster as possible. “I’d get every person in the crowd to get on him. I would turn it into an absolute riot,” Kyrgios said last month. The problem for the Australian would be when the actual tennis has to do the talking.
After all, there remains a possibility that there is little substance to Kyrgios’s postings and that an overreaction is exactly what he wants. It was only six years ago that Kyrgios was calling Novak Djokovic a “tool” who had a “sick obsession for wanting to be liked”, now Kyrgios refers to Djokovic as the GOAT (greatest of all time) and they are doubles partners, in an unlikely and definitely-not-staged “bromance”.
Perhaps Kyrgios was trolling Djokovic then, just as he is trolling Sinner now. Or perhaps the aliens did come to Earth to build the Pyramids.
