Alcaraz, Sinner, Roland Garros

Wow.

I recently heard of the term ‘grounding’. It’s quite the rage on YouTube and LinkedIn. Wellness gurus peddle it like a path to salvation. Something about electrical charges and reduced inflammation, about how modern life has severed us from nature’s skin. Walk barefoot through morning grass, they say, feel the dew between your toes, let the earth’s energy course through you like an intravenous balm. Make your body and mind dance to the rhythm of chirping birds and rustling leaves.

Now, picture the exact antithesis of this therapeutic idyll, and you arrive at summer tennis on crushed brick as the sun beats down on you - which is to say, you arrive at Roland Garros.

Here, on red Parisian clay, tennis becomes a brutalist sport. You have to scramble for every point, build a tolerance for punishment. The red dirt forces everyone to bend and slide and scrape and suffer. Every point leaves its mark on both court and body. The surface grabs at your feet, your clothes, the ball. This is where the sport’s aristocrats - your Federers, your Samprases - discover that grace alone cannot conquer all kingdoms. The clay demands that beauty submit to endurance, that artistry bow to attrition. The heat adds its own layer of torment, turning five-set games into military drills. This is tennis stripped of its hacks, its booming aces and easy winners. At Roland Garros, suffering is not merely incidental; it is the point.

The French call their clay courts “terre battue” which means “beaten earth.”

At some point during last Sunday’s French Open final, you felt a bit of sympathy for both Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. Sure, top-two in the world, but engaged in a battle that was testing a lot more than their ability to hit a ball. You were on the edge of your seat, wanting this absurd display of athleticism and skill to be hooked into your veins, but silently praying that both finish the game standing. Because, for hours, it looked like they’d sooner drop from exhaustion than ceding the scoreboard.

In the VIP boxes, Jannik Sinner’s mum and Andre Agassi wore the same expression. Exhausted from watching, unable to look away. Everyone around them, much the same. The spectators had become part of the spectacle.

But, wait, we must start at the top.

The Prelude

The story begins on July 3, 2022. Actually, it began three years earlier, at Juan Carlos Ferrero’s¹ academy, but it truly took off in 2022.

Anyway - Court One, Wimbledon, Carlos Alcaraz stood across the net from Jannik Sinner. Fourth round. Alcaraz was 19 years old, Sinner 20.

Two months earlier, Alcaraz had done something impossible. He’d beaten Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic on consecutive days in Madrid. In that blitz, he won four titles in four months and became the youngest to crack the world top-10 since Nadal himself. Alcaraz arrived in London with a halo forming around him.

Sinner was creating his own space, but more quietly. The word around was that the Italian’s game traveled better - grass, clay, hard court, no matter. That afternoon in London, he proved it. It was a masterclass in power and precision. Sinner dismantled Alcaraz’s electricity in four sets, allowing the Spaniard only a brief surge in the third. The rest of the match was played at Sinner’s angles, his tempo and pace.

They met again in Umag, Croatia. August heat, an ATP 250 final. Not a Grand Slam, but every title matters when you are barely out of your teens. Alcaraz took the first set with characteristic aggression; Sinner took the next two, and the title, with characteristic efficiency.

Five weeks after that came their first real masterpiece. The US Open quarter-final, September 7, 2022. None of them had played a Grand Slam semi-final before.

The game started with typical teenage-tyro pace and intensity, and soon went into new territory, a glimpse into the sport’s future. There’s a grammar to tennis - you attack, you defend, you build points like sentences. Sinner and Alcaraz threw out the textbook. They unfurled the full range of shots, sometimes within one rally. When the geometry said “play it safe” when their bodies were stretched like bowstrings at the corners of the court, they went for the impossible angle anyway. Because why not? The match went into midnight. The Arthur Ashe Stadium was half-empty but boisterous. The players pumped their firsts; the crowd roared back. Sometimes, you get lucky enough to witness tomorrow barging into today.

By the fourth set, Sinner was serving for the match and a spot in the semi-finals. Cap pulled down, face betraying nothing more than a deep thirst for hitting the bright yellow ball the hardest it has ever been hit. There were contours of a video game assassin to him.

Double fault. Break. The stadium erupted for the Spanish kid with short hair and a footballer’s legs. What followed was hurricane in tennis gear. Alcaraz’s shots began landing before Sinner could pivot. The fourth set blew past Sinner, then the fifth. It ended at 2:50 a.m. - the latest finish in US Open history, the second-longest match in the US Open’s 142 editions.

Alcaraz would lift the trophy - his first Grand Slam title - five days later. Nobody who watched Sinner that night would forget him.

By the 2024 French Open semi-final, the stakes had shifted. They were now amongst the best on the circuit, not just wiry youngsters trying to poke the senior-citizen bears. Alcaraz had two Slam titles; Sinner had one. Alcaraz entered as the overwhelming favourite for this title too.

First set: 6-2, a Jannik Sinner baseline clinic. Alcaraz counter-punched in the second, 6-3. Sinner responded with even more venom in the third. Two sets to one. The crowd, instinctively drawn to Alcaraz’s energy, willed him forward. He found another gear, maybe from them, maybe from somewhere deeper. Who even knows with him? Fourth set, fifth set, both to the Spaniard.

Two days later, Carlos Alcaraz was French Open champion. Five weeks after that, Wimbledon champion. Sinner responded by winning the next two Grand Slams.

Roland Garros next.

Act I: The Beginning and The End

This year’s Roland Garros began with Rafael Nadal.

Over the last few years, especially since 2021, Paris has been basically building a shrine to Rafael Nadal, brick by brick. First came the statue, made fittingly out of steel by Spanish sculptor Jordi Fernandez. It stands just inside the general public entrance gate, so that visitors are greeted by history when they enter these grounds.

Last year, at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, under a glittering Eiffel Tower, Zinedine Zidane (!) handed over the Olympic torch to Rafael Nadal for its final lap. Neither French by birth nor passport, but you’d have to travel the world to find too many people objecting to Nadal being in the frame for Paris’ magazine shot.

This year, Roland Garros went one better. They felt that a statue wasn’t adequate honour for the man who turned that tennis court into his backyard, who won fourteen titles here, who walked onto Court Phillipe-Chatrier as if God had blessed him personally. So they organised a ceremony at the start of the tournament to honour him. Every fan received an orange “Merci Rafa” shirt. Those in the upper tiers wore white, arranged to spell “14 RG” beside a trophy, and “Rafa” bracketed by two hearts on the other. Nadal, wearing a black suit, was ushered onto the court towards a podium in the middle of the service line.

Near the end of the ceremony, Nadal was joined on court by his three great rivals - Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray - all in black blazers, immaculate. The ceremony ended with a final arrow to heart as the tournament director unveiled a plaque on the court with Nadal’s footprint. Court Philippe‑Chatrier will bear his stamp forever. Immortalised.

Picture courtesy: Tennis Tonic

Watching Nadal in tears, his three great rivals beside him, was sobering. Not just because of nostalgia but because it felt like a page turned, landing at the acknowledgement section of a long, thrilling novel. Djokovic is still roaming the circuit, sure, but by the tournament’s end he too was hinting: “This might be my last Roland Garros.”

Much like Sampras’ shadow loomed over Federer’s early years, and Federer’s travelled in parallel as Nadal and Novak built their ladders to heaven, it will be a while before we shake off the sensation from the Big Three, even as Alcaraz and Sinner’s generation are writing their own stories.² These kids are brilliant, sure, but every forehand they hit gets measured against two decades of miracles we’re still processing.

Brian Phillips once invoked The Iliad to describe peak Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic.

“It’s a book about combat, about wild golden armies tearing each other to shreds, but here and there in every battle there are heroes whom no one can touch. Hector and Achilles and Ajax and the other superheroes of the B.C.E. basically wade through the enemy, mowing down everything in their path. They’re not even in danger. There’s absolutely no chance that some minor Trojan is going to bring down Achilles; it’s not happening. And after hundreds of pages of this, when they finally start facing each other, you can’t freaking believe how intense the moment is, because you’ve been primed to think they’re invincible.”

In the last year or so, Alcaraz and Sinner have begun - just begun - to create a similar kind of pull on the men’s circuit. Irrespective of who turns up where, those two will be in the latter stages. It’s almost, almost a guarantee that you’ll find both at every Grand Slam semi-final.

And so: the 2025 French Open final. Jannik Sinner vs Carlos Alcaraz, world number 1 vs 2, three Grand Slam titles vs four, 23 years old vs 22.

Act II: Push and Pull

Every time I watch a big final, I think back to the chef’s kiss of an opening line from Prem Panicker’s essay on PV Sindhu and Nozomi Okuhara’s World Championship final in 2017: “Epics have ordinary, even commonplace beginnings.” He’s right. So many big games, even with the most incredible finishes - think France vs Argentina, England vs New Zealand - start with tentative steps.

This match, too, started with fluffed serves and unforced errors. But if the quality of the day was still finding itself, the mark for intensity was placed early. It took 20 minutes to get through the first two games. Temperature in the thirties, peak of the afternoon, and neither willing to cede an inch. The scorecard crawled: 1-1, 2-2, 2-3, 3-3. Fifty-five minutes into the game later, Sinner finally broke Alcaraz’s serve decisively to win the first set 6-4.

Sinner had reached this moment without dropping a set through the tournament - six opponents, including Djokovic, all swept aside without a hiccup. Nineteen consecutive sets, more if you go back to the Australian Open. He prevailed here too, his baseline bombardment catching Alcaraz a bit off-kilter, but it wasn’t a complete domination. Not yet. One forehand here, one less unforced error there, and the set could’ve gone the other way. What Alcaraz couldn’t contribute through skill, he made up with his athleticism and energy. And Sinner rode with him, matched him.

This was already less a Grand Slam final tennis and more an endless highlights loop. The French Open is the slam of long, painful rallies, but this was long and insanely violent. The deeper they went into a rally, the harder they swung. They’d sprint to one corner, slide through the clay like they’re in an action movie, recover, sprint to the other corner, and then do it again. And again. Eight, nine, ten times per game. Every game. Ten, twelve games every set.

“There are muscles in your foot and your lower leg that are vital to the process. You see a lot of hard court players getting sprains on clay because of this. The feet work so differently on clay. On hard courts, you’re in constant motion. But on clay, you have to stop completely and then restart the machine. It demands enormous strength in the calves, the lower legs, and the feet.” - Carlos Rodriguez, the longtime coach of Justine Henin, the former No. 1 and four-time French Open women’s champion, in Christopher Clarey’s book The Warrior

In the second set, Sinner summoned the best of Djokovic and Agassi and Becker and every non-Nadal man to have succeeded here with a baseline game, and then raised the voltage by a few notches. Alcaraz helped with a bag of unforced errors, a product of attacking too much - if such a concept even exists in his dictionary.

5-2 Sinner. Fifteen minutes later: 5-5. Alcaraz was nowhere near his best, but he was making Sinner earn his wins. Then 6-6. Sinner swept through the tie-breaker. Two sets to nil up, two hours gone.

Twenty consecutive sets now for Sinner, mixing pace and power into something barely believable. Alcaraz had never come back from two sets down to win a match. It would take a hard, hard climb to break that pattern. Sinner was growing a foot taller and an inch wider with every point. You don’t just maul Carlos Alcaraz on clay.

You don’t. One break, two breaks, a down-the-line backhand here, a volley there, and voila! Carlos Alcaraz finds his mojo and takes the third set in 45 stormy minutes. He puts an ear to the crowd, and the packed Court Phillipe-Chatrier obliges with a roar.

Three hours and three minutes.

The fourth set goes the same way as the others had. 1-1, 2-2, 3-3.

At this point, caution has been thrown into the bin. Sinner wants to end this, Carlos wants to keep hitting until his body allows him to. Forehands lashed down the line, backhands hit at such an angle that make you wonder how such power can either be generated from your wrong side. Alcaraz is leveraging the miles on their legs and hitting chops and drop shots. He then creams a flat forehand winner from centre to corner that leaves even Andre Agassi shaking his head in disbelief. Sinner responds with nuclear-powered forehands whose force can only be measured on the Richter Scale. The backboard is still vibrating by the time the next point is served.

The thing with endurance tennis is that, with time, the quality starts fraying and players start playing for survival. They begin wearing out opponents, forcing them into mistakes. Not these two. This was bareknuckle boxing on clay.

Sinner breaks Alcaraz’s serve, then holds his own. 5-3. Alcaraz is serving to keep breathing. Then: double-fault, unforced error. Three championship points to Jannik Sinner. Oh, oh.

Alcaraz breathes, taps the ball on clay. He should be rattled, nervous, but his eyes are locked on the ball’s flight. His coach’s box screams, “Venga!” thrice. He goes into long rallies, the kind Sinner wasn’t particularly enjoying, and just about keeps himself afloat. Somehow, through divine magic, Alcaraz rescues that game.

5-4.

Before the final, amongst a smorgasbord of statistics and gotchas, one stood out: Jannik Sinner had never won a match that stretched beyond 3 hours and 50 minutes. He is now serving for the championship.

The army-green clock on the court, with a golden Rolex logo, ticks over to 3:51.

Act III: Hypnosis

Alcaraz breaks Sinner’s serve. Holds his own. A few minutes later, he absolutely smokes a forehand to take the tie-breaker.

The “¡Vamos!” from the crowd is now rebounding off walls, loud enough to be heard from outer space. WhatsApp groups are buzzing with uppercase lettering and exclamation marks. The air is thick with WTFs, except the “uuuhhh” of fuck rings out for a second before trailing into a sharp “kk”.

David Foster Wallace, is this what you meant when you said religious experience?³

Two sets all. Four hours and ten minutes.

Sport suffers from a dichotomy. On one hand, the idea of score is central to its competitive nature. Everything else is a layer on top of winning and losing. Wins make careers, losses leave scars. But there exists a higher form of sport where the scorecard begins to blur. When it truly becomes theatre. You watch for the ride someone’s imagination takes you on, the doors of your mind and heart they’re unlocking. You watch to feel the intensity of blood pumping through you, as you’re on your toes in your drawing room, at 2 am, screaming in front of a TV, physically willing on someone who shares nothing with you other than this moment. On some blessed days, you scream for their opponent too. There isn’t a drop of alcohol in your veins but you feel like running through a brick wall. You want to hold someone during this out of body experience, but how do you share the electricity that’s possessed you?

The details from the fifth set have already become hazy. I remember Alcaraz crouching low and sending a crisp, crosscourt backhand winner. I remember Sinner hitting a down-the-line forehand that was too fast even for Alcaraz’s turbo-charged twitch muscles. I remember an Alcaraz slice that swerved like a David Bekcham freekick and dipped like a Saqlain Mushtaq offspinner. I remember the hard serves and even harder returns that frankly just bent the mind. It is difficult enough to reach those serves early in the game, but these buggers were finding new inches in their wingspan as the first digit of the match clock went from 4 to 5.

I remember feeling that Alcaraz was moving up gears just as fatigue began to cast its faint shadows on Sinner. There were drop shots that Sinner didn’t chase. Then there was one he chased, returned, and it was so good that Alcaraz was caught on his heels.

The match went into a tie-breaker - of course it did - and Alcaraz found yet another gear. It wasn’t even real tennis at this point, just absurdist fan-fiction.

The match may have begun with unsure steps, but it ended with a shot of glory. Not a hit to the net, nor a double fault or an unforced error. Alcaraz pinged the most crisp passing shot down the line to seal the game. And then he collapsed onto the clay, taking a moment after five and a half breathless hours, letting the Paris evening air fill into his lungs.

Five Grand Slam titles. He held the Coupes des Mousquetaires in a tight embrace. This was probably his best thus far, but hopefully not his best ever.

Jannik Sinner, face still revealing little, retreated to his chair and put his hands on his eyes. What must he have felt, knowing that he was one hit away from a Grand Slam title?

Thirteen and a bit years back, in the hours after an epic Grand Slam final, Brian Phillips wrote these lines: “The cruelest thing about this glutted golden age of men’s tennis is that it keeps producing astonishing matches, matches that actually expand your idea of what sport can be, and someone has to lose all of them.”

At that point, who understood cruelty better than Sinner? That statistic of him never winning a match that extends beyond 3 hours and 50 minutes will live on for a while longer, and it will conceal the how he played in the fifth and sixth hours of this Grand Slam final. You’ll have to read the fine print to know that Sinner, in many ways, had a better evening. In a match where neither opponent could truly be separated, Sinner even won one more point: 193 vs 192.

Picture credit: BBC Sport.

The greatest compliment for the both came from the man whose footprint now graces the court: “It was a match for the ages.”

In his post-match podcast, Andy Roddick had wide eyes and a general look of exasperation. He’d seen plenty of tennis, but not much like this. Somewhere in that episode, he veered into a tangent: Grand Slam singles tennis is unique in its demands. Most other individual sports are shorter. You play in bursts. Tennis keeps you on the court for hours. Team sports let you specialise. Your teammates share the load, by design. Tennis wants you to master everything. You’re allowed weaknesses, but there’s no one to cover for them. The higher you climb, the tougher it gets to hide those weaknesses. The best players will exploit them, and you’ll be out there, alone. You can’t sub out, can’t tire. You either endure or you win. Tennis players, according to Roddick, are the best athletes anywhere.

After an evening like this, how do you even disagree?

“In retrospect, the 2025 Roland Garros final feels less like a match and more like a royal proclamation on ‘The King is dead, long live the Kings’ lines. These two have filled the void left by Federer, Nadal and Djokovic—filled it with a ferocity, an implacability, that brooks no challenge.” - Prem Panicker, in a howitzer of a piece, here.

Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are yet to turn 25. Sure, that means at least a decade of space for these two extraterrestrial talents to dominate tennis and claim their place in history. But if their Grand Slam meetings are anything to go by, it also means a decade more of out-of-body experiences for the audience.

Picture credit: Lionel Hahn

I’d call sport a hallucinogenic, but it’s healthy and the visions are real.

1. Yes, the same Juan Carlos Ferrero, ex-French Open champion, ex-World Number 1, and Carlos Alcaraz’s coach.

2. Hand on heart - when you watched Ben Affleck or Robert Pattinson’s Batman, did you not think of Christian Bale?

3. You must.