The story of how Jannik Sinner, a generational talent, vaulted from being a virtually unknown teen tennis prodigy to a global superstar goes like this: In 2018, at the age of sixteen, the Italian went pro. A year later, while still ranked a lowly 546th in the world, he entered a tournament in Bergamo, Italy, as a wild card—and won the whole thing. Not long after, he competed at the Next Gen ATP Finals against the best players twenty-one years old and under. He won that tournament, too, and burst into the top hundred. Suddenly, everyone in tennis was paying close attention to Sinner. Just a few years later, in 2023, he carried Italy to its first Davis Cup victory since 1976 and became a national hero.
The opportunity was there for Sinner to rise to the top of the sport, with greats like Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic on the downslopes of their careers. He seized it. In January 2024, he resumed his relentless march toward world domination, defeating Djokovic and Daniil Medvedev in back-to-back matches to win the Australian Open, his first victory at a major. The next month, he won the Rotterdam Open. In March, he won the Miami Open.
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On June 10, 2024, he became the number-one men’s tennis player in the world.
Two months later, Sinner rolled into New York City, site of the US Open, with high expectations to win the whole damn thing. But as the tournament began, news broke that Sinner had twice tested positive in the spring for a billionth of a gram of a banned anabolic steroid in his system. A subsequent investigation by the International Tennis Integrity Agency and an independent tribunal—during which he was allowed to play but couldn’t talk about the matter publicly—cleared him of any wrongdoing. In a statement at the time, he said, “I will now put this challenging and deeply unfortunate period behind me.” (In September, the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed the decision to clear Sinner. He has said he’s confident he’ll be exonerated again, and he’s allowed to keep competing in the meantime.)
Then Sinner—doing what he’s been training to do for the past decade—entered the record books again: He won the US Open, his second major in less than a year. And he didn’t just win; he dominated the competition, defeating his American opponent, Taylor Fritz, in three straight sets in the final. With that victory, he swept the year’s major tournaments played on hard court, becoming the youngest man ever to pull off this feat. His ascendance to the top of the game, which required years of total dedication to the sport—and still requires it—was swift and complete. And now begins the work of making sure he stays there.
Suit, shirt, and tie by Gucci; Datejust 41 in Oystersteel and white gold by Rolex.
Consider Jannik Sinner for a moment. At twenty-three, he is already the greatest Italian tennis player ever. (With apologies to Adriano Panatta.) His fellow countrymen adore him. He has fans who call themselves the Carota Boys, whose courtside costumes match Sinner’s tangle of strawberry-blond hair. Off the court, he is a brand ambassador for both Rolex and Gucci, looming down from building-sized advertisements across the capitals of Europe. He is, in many ways, larger than life.
With fame and fortune, of course, comes pressure, both on and off the court. Singles tennis is, by definition, not a team sport. There’s no sharing the blame when you lose a big match on center court. And the intensity of that crucible has derailed many a young player. If you’re Sinner—playing at the highest level of one of the world’s most popular and stressful sports—you embrace the challenge, you grow stronger as a result, you mow down the competition. “You have a lot of pressure; you have a lot of responsibility,” he says. “But if you don’t enjoy it then it means you chose the wrong job.”
What kind of twenty-three-year-old athlete has that kind of moxie?
One week after his US Open victory, I meet Sinner at the Méridien Beach Plaza hotel in Monte Carlo, overlooking the Mediterranean. It’s just after 5:00 P.M., and he’s wearing a gray Nike sweatsuit, his curls bouncing as he enters the room, his face both chiseled and boyish, his hand outstretched. The only marker of his wealth and success is the Rolex GMT-Master II on his wrist, a gift from the brand after he won the Australian Open. He speaks fluent English with a flat affect and a northern-Italian accent—none of the almost comical flourishes you find with most Italian speakers.
“I know you,” he says after we shake hands. This is true, though I did not expect him to recall our having met at a dinner party in New York two years earlier.
This all tracks with Sinner’s style of play. He isn’t flashy. He absorbs the shots of his opponents, returning them with ground strokes so powerful they’ve been known to make crowds gasp. You can hear a Sinner shot in the way it smashes off the racket with stunning speed. “For me, you don’t win a match the moment you step on the court,” he says. “You win 80, 90 percent with the physical preparation—how you warm up, how you prepare tactically.”
Jacket and shirt by Gucci; GMT-Master II in Oystersteel and Everose gold by Rolex.
Outside, it’s cocktail hour in Monte Carlo, a city built into cascading cliffs that push against an ancient body of water, now speckled with the yachts of the ultra wealthy. (Amuse yourself in Monte Carlo by Googling the owners of those yachts: soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, U2’s the Edge, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.) Sinner relishes the anonymity of Monte Carlo. “A lot of famous people are here, so nobody really cares about me, which is very good,” he says. The water is also a perk. “When I was young, I said I would never live near the sea; now I think completely different. It gives you strength. You recharge your energy after half a day on a boat; you come back and you feel fresh.”
The village where Sinner was born is landlocked, an eight-hour drive from Monte Carlo and another planet. Sexten, Italy, is a smudge on the map, two thousand people, give or take. It’s a ski town high up in the Dolomites with stunning views, so close to Austria you can practically hear strains of “Edelweiss” echoing off the mountains. If Sinner’s unaffected Italian accent comes off a bit . . . Germanic, it makes sense, as German was his first language.
His dad, Johann, was a cook at a ski lodge; his mother, Siglinde, a waitress at the same place. Hard, honest work is what it was, something not lost on Sinner. He saw the value in it. Still does, to his core. “That’s something my parents gave me: You always have to improve, you always have to keep working. Especially on tough days, especially when you’re tired, you still go to practice, just trying your best.
“It doesn’t matter if you are number one in the world or number one hundred—you always have to work, because someone will catch up, because someone will work on trying to beat you,” he says, adding: “I was very happy to have this childhood.”
All those hours at the restaurant came with a price, of course. Although his grandparents lived next door, Sinner often had to fend for himself, walking to and from school alone. He spent hours with his friends, and he skied, a lot.
When I ask him to tell me about his life in this village—and I swear I’m not embellishing here—he looks off into the middle distance and describes an idyllic setting that sounds like a hobbit shire. The atmosphere is pure and clean, he says; the food is natural. The quality of, well, everything is extremely high. “You live a very different life.”
He continues, “The biggest lesson from growing up where I did is ‘Don’t forget where you are from.’ It’s very easy sometimes to forget because we travel so much around the world. Sometimes you lose this feeling of Okay, I’m from a very normal place—how is it possible that I am where I am right now?”
At thirteen, Sinner left Sexten. He had considered life as a competitive slalom skier, but he showed so much promise at tennis that he moved to Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, to train with world-class coaches. “I made a decision to give tennis the best shot possible,” he says, “to become the best version of myself as a tennis player.” Sinner moved in with a coach’s family that included two kids and a dog.
Coat and shirt by Gucci.
As we talk, it occurs to me that he arrived to our meeting with only one person. No entourage necessary. Sinner also likes to take long, solitary drives in his Audi RS 6, where the pressure of competition—not to mention the Internet speculating about whom he’s dating—can melt away, if only for a couple hours. (And because I just brought it up: In May, he confirmed during a press conference that he’s dating fellow tennis player Anna Kalinskaya. “Obviously, you need someone who understands the rhythm, how everything works,” he says, without mentioning any names. “But I keep my personal life as private as possible.”)
Make no mistake, though: This man is no island. There are concentric circles of support around him. After a long day of training, he unwinds with a few rounds of PlayStation, squaring off virtually against friends he’s known since childhood. “They help me because they are honest,” he says. “I am the kind of guy who is very closed in the beginning but when I understand someone, I open up myself. But this rarely happens now because I have my friends; I am very good with them. I have my team who supports me, and my family, and I feel like I don’t need more.” Sinner is close with his older brother, Marc, his unofficial consigliere, the first person he calls in a crisis. He even speaks about brand partners as family. Rolex made him an ambassador in 2020, at the age of eighteen, before he’d cracked the top fifty in tennis. He hasn’t forgotten it. “Rolex was one of my first partners,” he says. “They showed me how professional you can be. It’s a very safe family.”
This is one of several times the notion of safety comes up.
Now consider Jannik Sinner again. At thirteen, he left his idyllic mountain village—the clean air, the natural food, the family and friends—to pursue one of the most high-pressure sports. By his early twenties, he’d been to Shanghai, Riyadh, Cincinnati; he’s traveled around the world more times than most of us have been to a tennis tournament. He’s collected almost $30 million in prizes and untold millions in sponsorships. With all that has come constant scrutiny of his performance.
How do you handle it all? Do you surround yourself with groupies and yes-men? Turn into an asshole? Crumble? In Sinner’s case, you find refuge in the people you trust, the ones who’ve been there since the beginning.
Ten minutes after winning the US Open, Sinner stood on a gleaming blue acrylic stage in the middle of sold-out Arthur Ashe Stadium, a scrum of photographers snapping away, the world watching from its TVs and smartphones. “This title for me means so much, because the last period of my career was really not easy,” he said. “There is my team who supports me every day, the people who are close to me. I love tennis. I practice a lot for this kind of stage, but I also realize that off the court there is a life.”
In press conferences and interviews, he returns to this idea: the safety of his inner circle. “It is still a tough year, but in another way, I have my team around me, and my team knows me very well,” he tells me. “I have my friends and family and everyone who knows me better; I have them around me. I feel safe with them.
“I am very well protected, especially in difficult times.”
Sinner is the present and future of tennis. God willing, a long life on the court awaits. “So many things can happen,” he says. “My goal is that when I finish my career that I have no regrets of: Could I have done something more?” There will be setbacks, of course. After we talk, Sinner will fly to Asia, where he’ll lose to the second-ranked tennis player, Carlos Alcaraz, in the finals of the China Open. Sinner being Sinner, he’ll then win the Shanghai Masters. A week later, he will defeat Alcaraz to capture the Six Kings Slam in Saudi Arabia.
“I feel safe on the tennis court, because you are focused on one thing: this yellow ball, which you want to put on the court,” he says. “The only thing you have to handle is the pressure, because the pressure is always there. It’s nice to have it. If you don’t have it, or you don’t care, you’re not in the right position.”
Given that pressure is Sinner’s constant companion, I decide to lob him a meatball of a question: When you’re in my town, New York, what’s your favorite place to eat?
“I always search for Italian food,” he says. Then, unsurprisingly, he adds: “Keep it safe.”
As seen in the opening image and cover: Jacket, shirt, and tie by Gucci; GMT-Master II in Oystersteel and Everose gold by Rolex.
Michael Sebastian is editor in chief of Esquire.
