How does a person recover from this: holding three championship points in a Roland-Garros final, only to let them slip, fight for two more hours, and lose the whole thing in the fifth-set super-tiebreak, against your internationally beloved arch rival, who was spurred on by the crowd? That experience would pulverize the average person psychologically. But if you had to devise a human who could withstand it, you might end up with something close to Jannik Sinner, master of the emotional reset. Yes, he looked shell-shocked while sitting in his chair in the immediate aftermath of that loss to Carlos Alcaraz. According to his coach Darren Cahill, Sinner and his team had a good cry afterwards. They discussed a few tactical details from the match. And then, after a 24-hour period, they didn't speak of that match again, and simply moved on to the grass season. Barely a month after that catastrophe, faced with the same happy and lethal opponent, with same magnitude of title at stake, Sinner locked in and won Wimbledon, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.
It's been a long time since the world's No. 1 player had notched a win over Alcaraz. Though Sinner has a staggering 99-9 record since the start of the 2024 season, five of those nine losses were inflicted by this one man. The defining rivalry of men's tennis had swung in Alcaraz's favor over the last two seasons, after a string of wins in Indian Wells, Roland-Garros, Beijing, Rome, and Roland-Garros again. Several of those matches were defined by Alcaraz's lucid and vicious play in the highest-pressure situations, like the match tiebreaks in Beijing and Paris. More concretely troubling for Sinner was the fact that his clearest advantage over his rival, the serve, had been at or below average in those meetings, in terms of first-serve percentage. In order to shift the matchup back in his favor, he'd have to serve accurately and hold his nerve.
Eventually he would satisfy both those imperatives on Sunday, but in the opening set, it looked like we were headed for a much messier match. Neither player served well and many points were decided out of a neutral rally. Sinner seemed intent on getting to the net, but those net rushes don't come as naturally to him as to Alcaraz, who is the two-time defending Wimbledon champion and still, even after this loss, the best grass-court player in the world. With Novak Djokovic in a diminished state, nobody on tour moves on this surface quite like Alcaraz, combining raw foot speed and the precision to safely navigate the slippery turf. In particular, nobody defends like him, scrambling in and out of the corners, sliding where necessary, and feeling the ball well enough to produce comically pure slices at a full sprint, like the one that sealed the first set for him.
Playing a defender of this caliber introduces a kernel of doubt—is my shot going to be good enough?—and you can see that doubt through the TV screen. Early in the match there was a tinge of indecision in Sinner's attacks in the mid- or front-court. It seemed, that at the point of contact, he was still making up his mind: Do I want to hit a normal volley or a swinging volley here? Do I take this passing shot flat up the line or try to loop it a little higher? Do I slide to get to this short ball or take three tiny steps instead? Is he going to track down this damn ball like all the others? And that compromised his execution. At least, those were my notes at the start of the second set. By the end of that set, Sinner had stopped second-guessing and solidified his decision-making. He polished off the final game of the second set with a pair of running forehands, struck with legs lunging parallel to the baseline and arm outstretched, a shot he hits harder and better than even Alcaraz.
In the third set, Sinner produced the sort serving he'd been desperately seeking in this matchup for over a year. After zero aces in the first two sets, he produced seven in the third set. The one I remember most is the second serve ace he fired at 30-30 in 3-4 game: a 117 mph slider right on the corner of the service box, the paint flying up. With his serve humming, Sinner was free to focus on securing that one break per set that can underwrite a grass-court victory. As Sinner's service games simplified, Alcaraz slowly lost his traction in the match. He had trouble defending his own second serve, which he'd later describe as the "big key" to the loss, as Sinner was able to get him on the defensive with big slashing returns.
The Alcaraz offense never spiked to the level of all-court creativity he maintained in the 2023 or 2024 Wimbledon finals, which is a credit to the ceaseless baseline pressure that Sinner applies to opponents. As his quarterfinal victim Ben Shelton put it, playing Sinner is like playing tennis at 2x speed. His ball speed is fast enough to rush even the best athletes on tour, and rushing Alcaraz, particularly on the forehand side where he prefers more time to set up, is perhaps the single most reliable game plan against him. Perhaps relatedly, we also didn't see the usual Alcaraz smiles on Sunday. The ones he unveiled at the end of the fourth set, as doom approached, felt more aspirational than actual. After a perfect 5-0 start, he lost his first major final. But he'll have many more looks at this title; no man has ever been more accomplished on grass courts at this stage of his career.
We'll never know how the match would have gone, but it's possible that this triumphant Wimbledon run from Sinner hung on the pectoral health of Grigor Dimitrov, who was comfortably leading the top seed by two sets to none before a shock retirement. That match, which also involved an elbow injury for Sinner, was the most dire situation he found himself in all tournament. Three matches later, he has captured his fourth major title, and the first one won away from hard courts, which are his preferred habitat. Looking back at Roland-Garros, he was one point away from holding all four major titles concurrently. He was a few inches away on a second-serve return. But he's never been one to look backwards—only onward, to the hard courts ahead.
