Don’t worry about Rome: Jannik Sinner is back—already—and just in time for Paris

The No. 1 Read is TENNIS.com's lead story for the day—look for more of them throughout Roland Garros.

Over the past three months, fresh new faces joined some familiar ones to exploit Jannik Sinner’s absence from tennis, leaving us to speculate about how the long layoff—triggered by a doping infraction)—would impact the idle No. 1-ranked player.

We needn’t have wondered.

Sinner appeared largely rust-proof in his return last week on home ground in Rome, and it sends a message to all regarding Roland Garros: Sinner is coming in fast, and coming in hard. Fast as Italy’s Frecciarossa (Red Arrow) bullet train, hard as the dolomite rock so abundant in his native South Tyrol. It’s almost as if the 23-year-old ginger had never been away.

The hubbub accompanying Sinner’s return in recent weeks overshadowed the fact that in Paris, Sinner will be vying to lock down his third consecutive (and fourth, overall) Grand Slam title, something only one man—Novak Djokovic, who else?—has achieved since 2011. The quest has been interrupted, but it hasn’t been set aside.

“Putting myself here to play the third match, it's already very, very good for me and my progress,” Sinner said, after winning the second match of his comeback in Rome. “Then we see what’s coming. I know I have to raise my level.”

That mantra, “Then we see what's coming,” was repeated day after day as Sinner belted his way to the Rome final. What came was a tennis Frecciarossa that left folks, even some of his most immediate rivals, slack-jawed. Or in some cases, prone to crazy talk.

“No, it doesn't feel so bad, honestly,” Casper Ruud admitted after absorbing a terrible beating in the quarterfinals. “I think it was more fun than anything, even though I lost 0-1.

“You just look at the guy and say, ‘This is kind of, yeah, next-level sh*t’—excuse my language—but I don't know what else to say. It was almost fun to witness at the same time.”

But in the final, Carlos Alcaraz was not as easily amused. He brought the bulley train to a screeching halt after a very competitive first set, and won 7-6 (5), 6-1. But Sinner was so satisfied with his week's work that he turned uncharacteristically poetic in his description of the domestic audience.

“They pick me up like a small child, no? The support was amazing.”

It’s unlikely he will feel the same degree of adulation in a week's time. And he will be facing an even stiffer, major challenge on the glorious—and notorious—terre battue.

Clay is not the surface where Sinner has done his best work. Also, it’s impossible to become battle-hardened for two weeks of best-of-five-set matches in the gym, on the practice court, or even at a Masters 1000 event like the Italian Open. True, Djokovic overturned the conventional wisdom on match toughness over the years, playing few or no tune-up events before winning a major. Sinner will find some comfort in that.

Perhaps more importantly, this will be the first time in more than a year that Sinner will not have to labor beneath a cloud of controversy. It was a burden that he has handled with poise and dignity ever since he first tested positive last March for Clostebol, which entered his system through a hand cream used by his masseuse.

“It feels like the first day when you go to school again, you never know what to expect,” Sinner said before his debut in Rome last week.

In other ways, though, it was his first day of plain-old freedom.

Close watchers of the game have noticed how the pall of controversy shifted some of the emphasis away from the evolution of Sinner's game.

“Sinner’s game has gotten way better very quickly,” elite coach and Tennis Channel analyst Paul Annacone told me in an assessment of the Italian’s progress at the end of last year. “He’s always been a wiry kid, right?

But I think his strength and the ability to come out of the corners when defending, and then turn it into offense, I think that's gotten way better over the last year or so. And the serve has also improved—quite a bit. Paul Annacone

Sinner’s record through the past, tumultuous 14 months underscores Annacone’s point. From August 2023 until his reboot in Rome, he was 102-8—including a 61-0 mark against players outside the Top 20. In Italy, he also ran a match-winning streak to 26 before Alcaraz intervened.

Of course, red clay is also a graveyard of dreams for hard-court experts like Sinner—and a happy hunting ground for the likes of Alcaraz, who is the defending champion in Paris.

Although Alcaraz, age 22, is roughly a year and three months younger than Sinner, he now leads him overall in matches, 7-4—including their last four meetings. The Spanish star also leads Sinner in the Grand Slam singles title derby, four to three, and enjoys a better Grand Slam winning percentage (84% to Sinner’s 79%). At Roland Garros, though, Alcaraz has a 10-point edge at 86%

But beware those numbers, because Sinner is a late bloomer, as shown by his accelerating progress of the past two years. That was plain 12 months ago at Roland Garros.

“He (Sinner) was weirdly close to winning the tournament last year,” Andy Roddick said on a Tennis Channel preview of Sinner’s return to Rome, referring to his five-set semifinal shootout with Alcaraz. Sinner led in that one, two sets to one.

“I thought he (Sinner) actually looked great on the clay last year.”

The stats from the 2024 clay season tell an interesting story. On the serve side, Sinner has smacked a total of 59 aces to Alcaraz’s 34. Although Sinner’s first-serve conversion percentage was lower, he won significantly more (79% to 68%) of those points. However, Alcaraz won a slightly higher percentage of second-serve points.

While Sinner was more effective when serving, Alcaraz flipped the script in the return game. He was better in almost all the categories including return games won (37% to 33%), and second-serve return points won (59% to 54%). However, Sinner converted slightly more break points (48 to 46) despite having fewer opportunities (120 to 158).

Roland Garros hasn’t always been hospitable to Sinner. He reached the quarterfinals in his 2020 debut, but failed to equal that achievement in his next three appearances. The last of those was a second-round loss to Germany’s Daniel Altmaier in 2023. To some, it also seemed a subtle turning point.

Jimmy Arias, the director of tennis for the IMG Academy and a Tennis Channel analyst, told me in a recent interview that calling that match with Altmaier was “driving me nuts.” Sinner, Arias said, was trying to win with the kind straight-ahead power that had produced great results for him during the early hard-court swing. But clay is a different animal.

“He (Sinner) just couldn’t or wouldn’t open up the court,” Arias said. “But I think after that match he began to play differently, like he realized that you can’t beat the Medvedevs and Zverevs with straight-ahead power. You have to maneuver the ball.”

Sinner went on a tear after that loss. A few weeks later, he made the semis at Wimbledon. He went on to compile a 28-5 record the rest of the year, and the crowning touch: his three wins (including one in Davis Cup doubles) over then-No. 1 Djokovic.

In 2024, Sinner claimed his first Grand Slam title at the Australian Open, defeating Djokovic and Medvedev respectively in succession to secure the win. He revived from a two-set deficit in the final.

“Now I still have to process it,” Sinner, an expert at understatement, said. “Beating Novak in the semis and then today Daniil in the final—they are tough players to beat.”

The technical and strategic improvements that drove the victory included use of greater variety, assuming greater risk, re-directing the ball in rallies, getting out of the corners more urgently (as per Annacone’s observation) and a rapidly improving serve, added up to a formidable, new whole. It was evident in that barn burner with Alcaraz in Paris last year.

“On the positive side,” Sinner said after that painful loss, “I have improved from last year for sure.”

Sinner went on to lose just six matches last year, including a Wimbledon quarterfinal to Medvedev. He won the US Open and then started this year by successfully defending his Australian Open title. Sinner lost just four sets combined in those two recent hard-court triumphs to emerge as Djokovic’s heir apparent on that surface. Two of the four majors are played on that surface.

Alcaraz is planted in the driver’s seat at Roland Garros, no doubt about that. But keep in mind what Sinner accomplished in Rome after a three-month layoff, and his analysis of the final:

“If I would go back, I would play a couple of points in different way, that’s for sure. I’m lacking some matches. There’s no excuses, though. It's just what I feel, if I would play them again, I would play them in different ways.”

That can be interpreted as a warning to one and all: Jannik Sinner is back and coming in fast, hard—and hot.