ROME (AP) — Even when he’s out injured, Jannik Sinner is still winning.
The Italian tennis player has a chance to become No. 1 in the rankings even if he misses the upcoming French Open because of a hip injury that has kept him out recently.
Unexpected losses for top-ranked Novak Djokovic and No. 4 Daniil Medvedev at the Italian Open mean that the second-ranked Sinner will take over the top spot if Djokovic doesn’t reach the final at Roland Garros.
For Sinner’s rapidly growing fan base in Italy and beyond, though, he’s already there.
No. 1 in terms of his model behavior. No. 1 for his ability to always say and do the right thing. And No. 1 in values.
When Sinner was denied a point for a glaringly missed call at a potentially decisive moment during his semifinal loss to Stefanos Tsitsipas at the Monte Carlo Masters last month, he hardly batted an eye, noting afterward that “everyone can make mistakes unfortunately — or fortunately.”
“He’s so relaxed, it’s phenomenal,” fifth-ranked Alexander Zverev said. “Us tennis players, we’re competitors. On the court, it seems like we want to kill each other. We want to fight for every single thing. It doesn’t seem that way with him. It just seems like he’s so relaxed and so relaxed about other things.
“After Monte Carlo, I just would flip,” Zverev added, noting how he saw Sinner in the locker room the day of the missed call. “He was so chill, saying ‘Yeah, mistakes happen. Whatever. It’s fine.’ … He understands, even at such a young age, that tennis is not the most important thing in the world. It took me a very long time to learn that. I was obsessed with it. I was going crazy by losing one match, and he’s really not that way. And that’s maybe why he has such early success in his career.”
At age 22, Sinner’s Australian Open title this year made him the first Italian man to win a Grand Slam tournament in nearly a half century — since Adriano Panatta raised the French Open trophy in 1976.
