To grasp the scale of the shock that unfolded the day before, it is enough to remember that the last time the top seed in the men’s Roland Garros draw lost before the third round was in 2000. Twenty-six years ago, in the second round, the great American Andre Agassi was stopped in four sets by Czech player Karol Kucera. Before Thursday, Paris had seen only four such cases in the Open Era. Not even 30 straight wins this season and five consecutive titles could save Jannik Sinner from an early defeat. It is entirely possible that those very numbers were what prevented the clear favourite from performing successfully in the French capital.
In the match against Juan Manuel Cerundolo, everything began routinely enough for Jannik. He led 6–3, 6–2, 5–1, and it seemed that, just as at Wimbledon in 2023, the Argentine would take only six games from him in total. But then the world No. 1’s body failed him — not for the first time. Cramps prevented the Italian from serving out the match twice. In the end, he was forced to take a medical timeout right in the middle of a game, at 5–4, 0–40. But even that did not save Sinner: of the last 20 games in the match, 18 went to Cerundolo, the ATP world No. 56. Dizziness and a total lack of strength got the better of the main title contender.
The Argentine deserves credit too, though, because he used his chance intelligently, constantly forcing his exhausted opponent to move. At the same time, he regularly used drop shots. In his interview, he admitted that Jannik had been stronger and should have won. But luck was on his side. Before this, Juan Manuel had never reached the third round of a Slam and had never beaten a top-10 player. He became the first Argentine since 2018 to defeat the world No. 1. Back then, at the US Open, Juan Martin del Potro beat Rafael Nadal. On clay, the last such case came in the 2003 Davis Cup, when Agustin Calleri defeated Juan Carlos Ferrero.
So what happened to Sinner? He himself said that he had woken up feeling unwell and lacking the necessary energy. He insisted that the issue was not the heat above 30 degrees, which has settled over Paris these days. Nor did it matter, according to him, that the match was first on court. And all the tournaments he played before the major were not to blame either. It was simply one of those days when, by the middle of the third set, his energy ran out.
From the outside, those explanations look a little odd, because everything that happened to the Italian looked more like heatstroke. We have already seen how heat and stuffiness affect Jannik: at the Australian Open against Eliot Spizzirri, and recently in Rome against Daniil Medvedev. On the other hand, why would he hide anything? But the tennis world, just as after the case involving Sinner’s positive doping tests, has split into two camps: those who believe him, and those who are not so sure.
Jannik now has at least two unpleasant stories connected with Court Philippe-Chatrier that he is unlikely to want to tell his grandchildren. Three missed match points in last year’s final against Carlos Alcaraz, and the meeting with Cerundolo, where he stopped one game short of victory. The problem is that Sinner’s next chance to complete the career Grand Slam will come only in a year.
It is worth recalling that, starting with the 2024 Australian Open, the Italian and the Spaniard had won the last nine Grand Slam titles between them. But Carlitos is absent with a wrist injury, and Jannik is already out. So someone else will become champion in the French capital. Of those still left in the draw, only Novak Djokovic has won a Slam before. The Serb has 24 of them, including three collected at the French Open.
Despite the sensational defeat, Sinner can still be satisfied with his clay-court season. He recorded 18 wins and just one loss. Jannik won all three Masters events on the surface: Monte-Carlo, Madrid and Rome. The only player to have done that before was Rafael Nadal in 2010. Even without defending the points from last year’s Roland Garros final, the 24-year-old Italian will continue to sit comfortably atop the world rankings. His lead over Alcaraz is more than 3,500 points. The rest are even further behind.
“I just need time to understand what went wrong,” Sinner stressed after the defeat. “I always try to look at things positively. So we need to take from all this the things we can fix in training over the few weeks before Wimbledon. After all, if you look at the clay season as a whole, it was a decent one. I was playing really well. When I arrived in Paris, I felt fine: I was moving well, hitting the ball well. But today I was just unlucky. This problem came from a number of factors, but things like this can happen.”
So the next time we see Jannik on court will be at Wimbledon. London is famous for its rain, but a muggy, hot summer in the British capital is hardly rare either. So, just in case, the Italian’s agents would be wise to start booking evening sessions for their client’s matches right now.
