In the search for explanations and understanding after what was immediately being held up for debate as the greatest tennis final ever, there is at least one certainty: that Jannik Sinner’s mother must forever be a courtside fixture at grand-slam tournaments. In these times of the “Great Tennis Depression”, when we have been wondering if the game could ever be the same again in the post Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era, we can at least say for sure that none of those three had a mother who was as box office as Siglinde Sinner.
Fair play to the TV director, who had the easiest job ever in having to find courtside pictures that reflected the spell-binding nature of what was happening on the Court Philippe Chatrier during the men’s singles final on Sunday evening. There was the option of going to Odell Beckham Jr, playing the role of No1 Carlos Alcaraz groupie, or to the smooth George Russell, so overwhelmed that he actually got to his feet to applaud, or to Spike Lee, who’s got that eye roll that tells us he’s just witnessed one of the great cinematic twists.
Yet the money shot was invariably Siglinde Sinner. Her 23-year-old boy, probably a bit tired at 5-4 in the fifth, chases down an Alcaraz drop shot to break back and keep himself alive — and the camera falls on her. At 5-5, he skips round his backhand and unleashes a forehand winner down the line — and it’s back to her. Alcaraz then matches him with a blistering service return — and we’re on Siglinde’s face again. For her, it’s five hours of forever welling tears reflecting either young Jannik’s extraordinary execution or the fact that Alcaraz is breaking his heart — and hers with it too.
Alcaraz, right, celebrates his victory over Sinner in what has been described by some experts as the best-ever final
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We can presume, though, that being Sinner’s mother is rarely ever such an emotional experience. Her Jannik doesn’t tend to lose matches. He actually doesn’t tend to allow his rivals to come close. He doesn’t even lose sets. En route to Sunday’s final, he hadn’t dropped a set. He only dropped two en route to winning the Australian Open in January. Before Sunday, he had won 29 grand-slam singles sets in succession.
Alcaraz is the only player in the world who can keep up with him. He and Alcaraz are way out ahead. Yet this distance that they are putting between themselves and the rest of the tennis world is one that defies logical explanation.
In the fourth round, Sinner required only two hours to dispatch Andrey Rublev, who is ranked No15 in the world. Alcaraz needed only one hour and 34 minutes to dance past his quarter-final opponent, Tommy Paul — now No8 in the world. It was exactly the same time required — one hour and 34 minutes — for Sinner to kill off Jiri Lehecka in the third round, yet Lehecka is the world No33. Quick work, all of it.
Last year, the International Tennis Federation found that there are 106 million tennis players in the world, 63 million of them male. It’s a statement of the obvious that reaching the top 1,000 is a big achievement. Only one out of every 1¼ million players makes it into the top 50.
In other words, the top 50 is an extraordinarily rarefied group of human beings. All of them are extreme outliers. In which case you might expect that there would always be tough, close matches between them, yet this is absolutely not the case — so much so that when, say, Alcaraz plays Paul, in searching for language to describe the disparity, we say that he is playing a different kind of game. Sinner dismantles Rublev and, again, we say that he is playing different tennis altogether.
Alcaraz and Sinner have lurched ahead and separated themselves from the chasing pack
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In the world of modern professionalism, this seems all the more unlikely. Pre-internet, the development of players and the knowledge and understanding of training techniques, particularly in different parts of the world, was less broadly shared, which meant that certain players or groups of players might lurch forward ahead of the rest of the game (Swedes, for instance, in the Eighties, Boris Becker out of nowhere).
That cannot be the case now, so you would expect that pool of the very best to be concertinaed together. Yet somehow Sinner and Alcaraz have lurched ahead and separated themselves from the pack.
All this is tied up in the strange magic of sport. At its most mystifying best, we get amazing human beings defying everything that seems explicable. An Olympic 100m final is an event that brings together the eight fastest humans on the planet — so you would expect them to be athletes of such similar quality that they would finish within millimetres of each other. Yet Usain Bolt could be metres ahead.
Same in the golf majors: the best in the world gather every time and yet Tiger Woods once separated himself so far from the field that he won four in a row.
The best that it ever got for tennis was when three players did that simultaneously. Four, briefly, when Andy Murray was able to hang with them. Remember the statistical unlikelihood of any player even making it into the world top 50 — yet for a decade and a half, tennis had three of those one-in-a-million players way out ahead of the rest.
It was clearly all so special that when it drew to an end, it really did seem that maybe tennis couldn’t be that good again. And maybe it won’t be, because Alcaraz and Sinner are only in their early twenties and we cannot know if their careers will have the longevity that defined the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era.
Sinner and Alcaraz’s rivalry means they will both have to raise their games — which is likely to lead them even further ahead of the chasing pack
SUSAN MULLANE/IMAGN IMAGES/REUTERS
Nevertheless, for now at least, reason and logic have again departed from the tennis rankings and allowed the two at the front to march off into the distance. No opponent that either faced en route to that French Open final detained them on court for more than 3½ hours; when they were finally against each other, the time it took to separate them was 5½.
They are now at a place that Federer, Nadal and Djokovic got to — where the very nature of their rivalry meant that they each had to elevate their games to stay in touch with each other, and that in turn meant that they just crept further away from the chasing pack.
I am thinking here of 5-6 on the Alcaraz serve in the fifth set, the two of them trading blows, Alcaraz forcing his way up to the net and Sinner unloading a thunderous forehand straight at his belly button which Alcaraz tamed with a stop-volley so beautifully caressed that it killed the point stone dead. Really exquisite tennis delivered at a moment of extreme high tension; the pair of them reserving their best for the other.
Cue pandemonium, Beckham roaring, Russell on his feet, the TV cameras going to poor Siglinde Sinner’s grief-stricken face and then to Lee, whose eyes are twinkling as though he’s never seen anything like it.
The crowd became hugely pro-Alcaraz, no doubt because the Spaniard is just so much fun; no doubt, too, because Sinner comes to it with the opposite, ice-cold, expressionless demeanour. The Parisian crowd clearly favoured an Alcaraz comeback, too, because they wanted their afternoon to endure for as long as possible.
Sinner showed both generosity and humility during his post-match interview
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Somewhere in there, too, is the fact that Sinner is just out of a drugs ban, which, for a number of reasons, remains intensely unsatisfactory. It is impossible to say for sure for how long and to what extent that episode will be held against him but there can be no PR for him half as effective as Sunday’s final.
It wasn’t only his sportsmanship in conceding line calls that went against him, though that helped. So too did the way he conducted himself after the match, particularly the generosity and humility in his post-match interview.
More than anything, it was the greatness of his tennis, his ability to raise its quality and the entire occasion to something that felt historic, something that had experts hailing it as the best-ever final.
Much more of all that and many will be forgiving the sins of his past, rightly or wrongly, but certainly inevitably. That is how it will be if he remains one half of the great new double act of the game, two players playing a different game from everyone else. Even if his mother cannot watch.