Writers once liked to associate Novak Djokovic, the greatest male tennis player of all time, with inanimate objects. Some representative headlines from Djokovic’s prime: “Novak Djokovic Is The Perfect Champion for the Age of AI”; “Machine Flips Switch”; “The Cyborg-ian Glory of Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon”; “The French Open, Novak Djokovic, and the End of the Machine Age in Tennis.”
To watch Djokovic at his best is to know it is unthinkable that he could miss a ball; that his backhand, whether struck casually or from a gymnastic position with legs parallel to the ground, will fall safely into the space on the court most uncomfortable for his opponent; that while the backhand is the more reliable shot, the forehand is deadlier, more versatile, and is Djokovic’s preferred weapon; that the first serve on a break point will not only go in but kiss the outside of the line and fly past the stock-still opponent; that he will hang in points for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty-four shots if necessary; that when he looks exhausted, out of air, he will recover fully in no more than a minute; that being booed only makes him stronger. Djokovic has won the Australian Open ten times. One year he did it with a torn hamstring. Another year he did it with a torn abdominal muscle. Both times, his movement inexplicably improved as the tournament went on. Instead of worsening, his injuries seemed to heal the more he punished his body by violently sliding around the cement court. Some fans accused Djokovic of faking his ailments. Analysts were at something of a loss, acknowledging that established wisdom about injuries didn’t apply to this bendiest of men. Unless you loved Djokovic, this was all fairly irritating to watch, with awe occasionally puncturing your annoyance. You rooted for other players to beat him while knowing that they couldn’t.1
Still, for such a perfectly balanced player, Djokovic liked to flirt with danger. Sometimes he’d play the first set as if in practice, using it and maybe losing it simply to gain his opponent’s measure before destroying them. Sometimes he’d pick a fight with an unruly fan, the chair umpire. He broke rackets in anger. Under extreme duress, he sometimes prayed exasperatedly, as if that would bring the finish line closer. The rare times he met his match, a glorious five-setter would be born. Djokovic had his share of off days too, despite his reputation. He hit 100 unforced errors in a match against Gilles Simon just four days before pureeing Federer in that 2016 Australian Open semifinal, and inexplicably lost his balance while hitting forehands in a match against Juan Martin del Potro in Shanghai, nearly falling multiple times, in what has since been immortalized as his “drunk forehand.”
If Djokovic’s athletic prowess could approach the cyborgian, his personality was all too human. At the 2020 US Open, he found himself in an unexpectedly difficult first set against Pablo Carreño Busta. The man known as PCB saved a set point with a Hail Mary forehand that caught the rim of the baseline; Djokovic then took a tumble, seeming to hurt his shoulder. After trying a silly drop shot that PCB easily tracked down, Djokovic gave a ball a firm, frustrated underhand swat toward the back of the court. It struck a lineswoman in the throat and she sank to the ground, clutching her neck. Officials promptly disqualified Djokovic from the tournament, which he was favored to win. The next season, he won the Australian Open, Roland-Garros, and Wimbledon, entering the US Open with the opportunity to be the first man to win the Calendar Grand Slam since Rod Laver in 1969. Every opponent gave him hell. Djokovic fended off the first six but had nothing left for the final against Daniil Medvedev. On a changeover, minutes before his straight-set loss became official, Djokovic sobbed into a towel, as the stress of chasing history boiled over. The crowd cheered rapturously.2
By 2024, many were relieved to see Djokovic start losing and descend from his peak after a prolonged thirteen-year stay, with a two-year period in the wilderness included. (And even that was only because he balked for too long at surgery for an injured elbow.) His inevitability had ruffled feathers, especially among acolytes of Federer and Nadal, who preferred those players’ flashier styles and were saddened to see them fall to Djokovic so many times.
After Djokovic began to decline, a 22-year-old South Tyrolean named Jannik Sinner took the number one ranking and held it for more than a year. Sinner hits the ball harder than Djokovic, plays with less variation, neglects the outer contours of the court more often, emotes even less than Djokovic on the latter’s most subdued day, is less forthcoming in interviews, and is far less likely to participate in any match worthy of preserving in a time capsule. His style is more reminiscent of a machine than Djokovic’s ever was, and he lacks the personality to compensate for the entertainment deficit. Perhaps we should have been more grateful that Djokovic made us feel anything at all.
Sinner’s rise to tennis’s machine-king throne looked unlikely until about two years ago. By late 2023, he had earned an identity as an underachieving top-fifteen stalwart, despite brief flashes of excellence. I liked watching Sinner around this time. I’d been in Melbourne for the 2023 Australian Open and sat in Federation Square for most of his quarterfinal with Stefanos Tsitsipas, silently rooting for Sinner to complete a comeback from two sets down. Sinner looked imperious in the third and fourth sets, commanding the court with brutal groundstrokes that exploded off his racket with pace and spin, as if thrown by a lacrosse stick. Sinner celebrated his successes by punching the air—uppercuts, hooks; Terence Crawford would have been impressed with the range—and flashing a grin at his support team after his best shots. But on the first point of the deciding fifth set, Sinner biffed an overhead smash, one of the easiest shots in tennis. That seemed to slash his tires. Tsitsipas won the set comfortably.
It took a couple years for Sinner to eradicate his weaknesses. A seminal moment allegedly came after a quarterfinal loss to Djokovic at Wimbledon in 2022. As the legend goes, Sinner’s coach Darren Cahill went to Djokovic for advice on how to improve his game, and was told that the young Italian was too predictable. Aside from the devastating speed of Sinner’s standard rally shot, there was nothing for Djokovic to fear. Many attribute Sinner’s subsequent success to the newfound variety of his game: backspin-loaded slices, soft drop shots, angles that prod the sidelines of the court and supplement his missiles. As of September 2025, though, Sinner still led the “core shots” leaderboard on the ATP Tour, meaning he strays from his bread-and-butter play less (11.7 percent of the time) than anybody else (19 percent on average). One story from the Australian Open in January highlighted that his forays into variety had grown to 13.7 percent, which would have moved him down on the leaderboard to . . . second. In fact, Sinner’s learned how to hit his average shot even harder and deeper into the court, at no cost to his own consistency. Djokovic was wrong: All Sinner really needed to do was master his best trick even further, to the extent that anticipating it no longer did a player any good.
Djokovic won four of his first six matches against Sinner, and was favored to win once more when they met in the semifinals of the 2024 Australian Open. Instead, Djokovic played a tragically poor match. Reports surfaced that he’d had a fever the evening before, but in the past, even an ailing Djokovic could have played this badly only in his nightmares. His lone achievement of the day was losing in four sets instead of three in a row. This marked the true beginning of Djokovic’s long-awaited decline, to that point teased only with occasional bouts of fatigue or perhaps a half-percent dip in his frenetic movement. After the meltdown in Melbourne, Djokovic lost eight sets in a row against Sinner, broke serve only twice in sixty attempts, and generally looked cooked. When Sinner swept past Djokovic at Wimbledon in 2025, I considered the merits of invoking a mercy rule the next time they played. At an exhibition in October, Carlos Alcaraz, the most entertaining player in the world, called Sinner-Djokovic one of best matchups in the men’s game. He was either lying or sneakily indicting the ATP Tour for a glaring lack of fun matchups that did not involve him.
Or perhaps he could see the future. Djokovic entered January’s 2026 Australian Open semifinal with Sinner as a long, long underdog. The boldest prediction I could find picked him to lose in four sets, rather than straights. Djokovic won in five, but the scoreline doesn’t do justice to the audacity of the upset. Even the 2019 Wimbledon final, which Djokovic won over Federer despite trailing in every meaningful statistical category but unforced errors and match point conversion rate, lacked this element of surprise. In Melbourne, Djokovic saved sixteen of eighteen break points; compensated for a deficit in winners, serve performance, and return performance; and came back from being down two sets to one. By the end, the outcome had something of Djokovic’s old inevitability. Sinner laid siege to Djokovic’s serve in the fifth set, producing eight break points, but Djokovic saved them all, and converted the only break point he had a look at himself to take the set 6–4. It was the best Sinner-Djokovic match in years, and maybe of their entire rivalry. I thought back to 2023: Once again, Sinner was losing in five sets, and once again, I had enjoyed watching the match.
Of course, most of Sinner’s opponents are not Djokovic. At the 2025 Australian Open, Sinner met then–world number two Alexander Zverev in the final and won in straight sets, becoming the first victor of a first-versus-second final who didn’t even have to face a break point. (Ticket prices plunged as soon as the Alcaraz-less matchup presented itself.) I was in Melbourne again to cover the tournament, and didn’t even bother tuning in until the last few minutes; I’d already reached the end of my draft. Daniil Medvedev, who once beat the prior, mortal incarnation of Sinner six times in a row, has only won one of his last ten against him. Sinner has dominated the seventh-ranked Alex de Minaur so thoroughly that last year, after receiving his worst thrashing yet, de Minaur admitted he’d have to avoid Sinner in the draw to ever win a major. Since going bot mode in 2024, Sinner has won 151–15 against the field, a percentage rarely reached; and against players other than Carlos Alcaraz, Sinner is a terrifying 144–8.
Watch Sinner play and you’ll wonder how he possibly lost those seven matches against the riffraff. The notion that he could lose is simply not realistic. Since a flat loss to Alcaraz in the 2025 US Open final, Sinner has been serving at a historically high level, denying opponents even the opportunity to be annihilated by his groundstrokes and us the opportunity to see anything but curt, monochrome points. Any intrigue is not over a win or loss, but tiny details: Can the opponent break Sinner’s serve? Reach a break point? Win more than two or three points against Sinner’s first serve? Get that first serve back at all, and survive the devastating follow-up forehand if they do? Sinner’s mastery is staggering; it also, to my mind, effectively defeats the purpose of watching tennis. His matches reduce a two-way sport to a demonstration of excellence by one extremely consistent and calm individual. In November, Sinner won the ATP Finals—a tournament featuring only the best eight players in the world, theoretically the most competitive bracket on tour, given the quality of the field—for a second year in a row without even losing a set. Only the final against Alcaraz held any genuine danger for Sinner, as Alcaraz managed to go blow-for-blow despite picking up a hamstring edema early in the match. There wasn’t much to miss in Sinner’s other matches.
To the press Sinner speaks in a flat monotone, often dismissing the premise of a question before giving his non-answer. He openly talks about how much he hates press conferences. He has spoken of wanting to “delete” or “cancel” bad memories from matches that he let slip away. While the vaccine skeptic Djokovic’s political and scientific views rankle for their lack of basis in fact, Sinner hasn’t bothered to share what he believes about much of anything. In a story for Vanity Fair Italia, the writer Federico Rocca noted that Sinner ate a fruit salad by taking a series of identical bites, arranging pineapple, strawberry, and a quintet of blueberries on his fork just so, every time.
The platonic ideal of a match consists of two players whose distinct styles flourish in concert. This is sometimes a tricky tension, since players are constantly trying to make each other look bad. Spectators want collaboration, but the players are fighting a war, and there’s no tactic more reliable than hitting your best shot into your opponent’s worst. Still, what makes tennis worth watching are the times when two rivals accidentally help each other to glory. The 2009 Australian Open semifinal between Nadal and Fernando Verdasco is the best match I’ve ever seen, for that reason. The underdog Verdasco swung at every forehand like a vengeful executioner, while Nadal, one of the quickest tennis players in history, performed miraculous acts of retrieval far behind the baseline. Verdasco hit 95 winners and lost; Nadal sobbed from sheer stress before the match ended. The match, a perfect, ecstatic union of two very particular styles, exceeded five hours and easily filled a 30-minute highlight reel.
Sinner’s style is more hostile to his dance partners than any other I’ve witnessed. He hits each ball hard, heavy, and deep in the court, and eventually the opponent wilts. Even the best forehands are bound by the milliseconds required to wind up and strike the ball, and Sinner’s groundstrokes simply will not let you have those moments. The most thrilling part of his game is the way he slides around the court on defense, and I would love to be able to watch him stretch that ability to its limits in the hopes of eliciting errors from a redlining opponent. Unfortunately, that is next to impossible, because Sinner’s game is so stifling it negates any chance the other player has to catch fire. Sinner is simply playing his natural game; there’s hardly any room for him to go wrong even if he wanted to. When he does get dragged into a competitive match, the first instinct is to diagnose him with a physical ailment, which most of the time proves to be the case. Sinner has never won a match longer than three hours and forty-eight minutes, something of a joke in tennis circles, but you can’t get him there unless something’s wrong with him or you’re an all-time-great yourself. Cramps, the heat, a minor injury; they’re all more threatening to Sinner than his average opponent. If you’ve seen one Sinner match, you’ve seen them all.
Well, not quite all. We cannot avoid the subject of Carlos Alcaraz any longer. Alcaraz is an audacious shotmaker, the type to not even know what a core shot is. Time after time, he hits an incredibly difficult shot at a moment in the rally when safety would suffice, and his superhuman ability to take a ball seemingly doomed to land meters out and instead pilot it to a creative destination. Though his wins don’t always feel any less assured than Sinner’s, the way he arrives at them evokes fear and joy, at least for the spectator. But Alcaraz himself has a strange immunity to nerves. He hits harder forehands and softer drop shots when a match hangs in the balance, and he makes them all, even the ones that should logically go in no more than one or two times out of ten. He is indefatigable, with a 15–1 record in fifth sets. (Sinner is 6–11.) A year and a half younger than Sinner, Alcaraz is nonetheless more accomplished in just about every meaningful category. His early-career trajectory is steeper and more accomplished than even Djokovic’s was. Sinner, though, leads the data company Tennis Insights’s Quality Scores rankings in forehand, backhand, return, and overall performance rating, and tends to beat the rest of the field by even more lopsided scorelines than Alcaraz. This creates the illusion that Sinner is unbeatable and, among many, that he is the better player.
That does not hold true when the two meet. Alcaraz gained Sinner’s measure more solidly after Sinner leveled up his game. Sinner won four of their first seven matches, back before his bot days, but since March 2024, post-bot, Alcaraz has won seven of nine. Stranger still, Sinner has been in position to win many of these matches. In their 2024 Indian Wells semifinal, Sinner swept through the first set 6–1, only to lose the next two. In their next match, he led 6–2, 2–0, and Alcaraz came back again. The third time around, Sinner stole a close first set and was up in the second set, then led 3–0 in the deciding-set tiebreak, at that point having won eighteen of his last nineteen tiebreaks. Alcaraz swiped another victory by winning seven straight points, many of them so audacious that other players would never have dared to try them, even in a practice session. Worst of all was the 2025 Roland-Garros final, in which Sinner led by two sets and a break, then had three match points in hand in the fourth set. You can probably guess what happened next.
To Sinner’s credit, it was the most vicious fight he’s ever put up. He spent most of the fifth set down a break, which seemed to assure Alcaraz’s victory, given the overwhelming momentum Alcaraz had built in the previous set. But with Alcaraz serving for the match, Sinner broke back. On one point, he ran down an Alcaraz drop shot and returned it with a better one. The ball followed a path I’d never seen before and thought so impossible that initially I was certain Alcaraz’s ball had bounced twice. Sinner advanced to within two points of the win again, and did indeed win two more points in the match—but Alcaraz won twelve, raising his game to a heavenly plane far above Sinner’s. Though you saw Sinner’s weaknesses in the match—nerves on the match points, physical frailty in the fifth set—his surge at the very end absolved him of his shortcomings to the extent that most of the tennis community insists he didn’t choke in this match. This remains an outrageous notion to me, even in full awareness of how ridiculous Alcaraz’s comeback was. If the number one player in the world having three match points in hand only to lose thirteen of the next fourteen points isn’t a choke, nothing is.
When a choke like that happens in a major final, with dramatic ramifications—Sinner could have tied Alcaraz at four major titles by winning; today he’s slipped to 4–7—it has the potential to derail or even ruin a career. Tennis fans whisper “Guillermo Coria” as a cautionary tale, his epic choke in the 2004 Roland-Garros final now synonymous with his name. What would happen to Sinner? An uncharacteristic loss to Alexander Bublik in his next tournament indeed suggested an emotional hangover. But in the one after that, at Wimbledon, Sinner decisively and methodically beat Alcaraz in the final. The rhythm of that match and the wavelength of the winner were evident in the algorithmic scoreline alone: 4–6, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4. It was as if Roland-Garros had never happened.3
Rewatching old Sinner matches, it’s striking how many of his shots land near the middle of the court, juicily sitting up for the opponent to attack, and how much time he spends on defense. Unfortunately for the spectator, if not for Sinner’s record, what made his tennis interesting proved to be an inefficiency, which he has duly eliminated. And don’t go looking for the smiles and air punches that endeared Sinner to me three years ago, because you won’t see them from the dominant, composed player he is today. Some of this restraint might stem from Sinner’s unhappy brush with a doping scandal. In 2024, he tested positive for a small concentration of a banned substance; after the news broke, he seemed significantly more subdued on court. (An independent tribunal ruled him at no fault or negligence; following the World Anti-Doping Agency’s appeal, he settled on a three-month suspension, which he served in early 2025.) But there’s also just not much to celebrate in your standard 6–3, 6–2, 6–2 win over Alexei Popyrin, or your ninth consecutive evisceration of Ben Shelton. His personality has evaporated along with the friction in his matches.
Sinner now cuts an impassive figure on court. His eyes harden slightly when he celebrates winning a point, which he always does the same way: He grips his racket, handle toward the ground and frame to the sky, and shakes the string bed affirmatively, looking over the top toward his coaches. Occasionally he will daringly attempt a light fist pump. Even as the recent Australian Open semifinal slipped away from him, Sinner didn’t act out; nor did he celebrate beyond the norm when he saved a match point that Djokovic seemingly had sewn up. Djokovic has always drawn power from a raging well of spite, while Alcaraz draws from a fountain of joy. Sinner doesn’t derive his success from any emotion that I recognize.
The nadir of the Sinner-watching experience still looms ahead. If he can further optimize his game to the point that he can rout even Alcaraz, there’ll be no one left who can expose his mortality. I still expect we’ll avoid that hellish future; Alcaraz, who has never lost three matches in a row to any opponent and is on a historic trajectory, is too good and too versatile to ever be solved. Tennis is about more than simply destroying your inferiors as ruthlessly as possible. It’s also about how you perform against players just as good as you, players who can reveal the precise depths and limits of your talents. It’s about winning five-set matches. That unseen strength, that ability to overcome physical and mental limits, to hit shots that do not make sense, is why Alcaraz has won three of the last four majors, and is why Sinner, despite his serve precision, groundstroke depth, balance on defense, and raw pace, has yet to prove he can beat Alcaraz with any regularity. But, I admit, it’d be darkly poetic if he did someday—if the least telegenic top tennis player of our era, armed with the very characteristics that strip matches of their resonance, also became the best.
Listed out like that, certain robotic descriptions of Djokovic probably read as reductive. Merely summoning some highlights from the man’s peak—I recommend the 2016 Doha final against Rafael Nadal, or the Australian Open semifinal against Roger Federer—should disabuse you of that notion. ↩
This was just Djokovic’s second-most extreme yearlong emotional arc, after getting deported from Australia in 2022 because of his refusal to receive a Covid vaccine, only to return to win the Australian Open in 2023. Djokovic adheres militantly to his dubious beliefs about vaccines and various healing powers, declaring his willingness to forgo championships (as he did at the Australian Open), and smilingly playing tennis with RFK Jr. ↩
Nonetheless, William Skidelsky vouched for Sinner’s humanity in the London Review of Books blog, observing Sinner’s stilted walking form and disjointed service motion and writing that “What struck me on Centre Court last Sunday was how unmachinelike he often appears—especially when not actually hitting the ball.” Just why most of us watch tennis, to draw conclusions from the moments when tennis is not happening. ↩
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