Jannik Sinner rivals fail to capitalize on No. 1's absence

When it came to hard-court tennis in 2024, Jannik Sinner was the new sheriff in town. No matter how good you were, and no matter how well you might be playing at a certain tournament, you inevitably ran into a brick wall when you came up against the Italian.

Sinner went 53-3 on the surface, and won seven titles on it, including two majors and three Masters 1000s. Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, Taylor Fritz, Novak Djokovic, Andrey Rublev, Casper Ruud, Alex De Minaur: All are Top 10 players who had their dreams of recent hard-court glory brusquely terminated by the lanky redhead. Zverev, who was trounced by Sinner in this year’s Australian Open final, was left shaking his head at the gap between them.

“Yeah, he completely outplayed me,” the world No. 2 said of the world No. 1.

Soon after, though, the German and his tour-mates were granted a brief reprieve. Sinner was suspended for a 2024 doping violation until May 4. Here was a chance for the players behind him to catch up in the rankings, and to do it on Sinner’s favorite surface. There were hard-court events every week in February and March, highlighted by the point-rich Sunshine Double in Indian Wells and Miami where Sinner has always excelled.

Read more: Jannik Sinner gets three-month ban in doping case settlement

Zverev headed straight to South America to play three tournaments. Alcaraz made his debuts in Rotterdam and Doha. Medvedev, Rublev, Fritz, De Minaur, Tsitsipas, Ruud and the rest of the Top 20 plowed ahead with their usual busy hard-court schedules. Yet here we are at the end of March, and nobody has made much progress. Instead, something close to chaos reigns, as the men all struggle to find their form at once. Even the guys who played well enough to reach the semifinals in Indian Wells—Alcaraz, Medvedev, Jack Draper, and Holger Rune—all lost their opening matches in Miami.

Alcaraz is currently No. 3 and looking to move into the Top 2 before the seedings are made at the Slams. But he failed to defend his Indian Wells title, then lost his opener in Miami for the first time, to 34-year-old David Goffin. He’s typically shrugged off a defeat or chalked it up to one bad day, but not this time.

“How am I feeling?” Alcaraz asked himself after the Goffin match. “Dreadful. Dreadful because of this defeat and because this is a tournament I always want to do well at, and losing my first match hurts.”

Medvedev, a self-proclaimed hard-court specialist who won Miami in 2023, has been even worse. He’s just 12-7 on the year, hasn’t been to a final, and is in danger of falling out of the Top 10 for the first time since 2018. According to Medvedev, his game is OK, but the balls that the tour is using are too soft and slow for him to make his shots work the way they used to. During his straight-set loss to Jaume Munar in Miami, Medvedev called over the supervisor to ask who could possibly have approved the balls they were using.

“I do think that something on the tour right now doesn’t favor my game,” he said afterward. “So, for sure it’s tougher for me to win titles, and…beat guys who are in a good day.”

As for Zverev, he says now that he “made some mistakes” after the Australian Open, by getting back on the practice court too quickly, instead of giving himself “time to process” his defeat. He says that a long stay in Indian Wells after his early loss there has helped.

Keep going through the Top 15 and you see the same inconsistency. Rublev won a title in Doha last month, but hasn’t won a match since. Tsitsipas won a title in Dubai, but didn’t reach the quarters in Indian Wells or Miami. Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, and Ben Shelton haven’t capitalized on Sinner’s absence, or the upheaval at the top.

As we make the transition from hard court to clay, the ATP is a sea of faces bobbing up and down in the water. As some players drop, guys like Draper, Rune, Denis Shapovalov, Arthur Fils, Seb Korda, Lorenzo Musetti and a dozen others rise. That includes Novak Djokovic, who hasn’t had a good year, but could be in position to take advantage of the current void at the top.

All of that is normal; in an 11-month season, even the best players have their dips and lulls. The difference right now to me is Alcaraz.

This first part of the season, I said that I felt I was playing good tennis. I was feeling good, but after this defeat, I don’t know what to say. Carlos Alcaraz

Since 2023, he and Sinner have grabbed the baton from the Big 3, and they looked set to become the tour’s dueling monarchs. Sinner has done his part, and Alcaraz has done his at the Grand Slams. But the Spaniard has proven more vulnerable in best-of-three events than I would have thought. He won four titles in 2024, but only two outside of the majors. If Sinner is absent from a tournament like Miami, and Alcaraz loses early, things go haywire from there.

Alcaraz has six weeks until Sinner returns. Presumably, he’ll play in Monte Carlo, Barcelona, and Madrid during that time. The timing for him to return to clay, his favorite surface, couldn’t be better. But he doesn’t sound so sure of his immediate future at the moment.

“This first part of the season, I said that I felt I was playing good tennis,” Alcaraz said after his Miami defeat. “I was feeling good, but after this defeat, I don’t know what to say.”

I don’t know what to say: That sounds like a pretty good description of the state of the ATP right now.