Alcaraz and Sinner, Once Again
Continuing the conversation with Changeover author Giri Nathan as the pair at the top continues to distance themselves from the pack.
The tennis tours have shifted to Asia, but the story on the men’s side remains very much the same: Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner remain the guys to beat.
Top-ranked Alcaraz won ATP 500 Tokyo while Sinner won ATP 500 Beijing this week, further distancing themselves from the pack and making clear they are the story of this year…much like they were last year, too.
Fortuitously for tennis fans, the Alcaraz-Sinner story has already been put into book form with considerable aplomb by author Giri Nathan, whose book Changeover details the rivalry’s ascendance to preeminence during the 2024 season.
Giri and I discussed the book, the rivalry, and his reporting during the U.S. Open; you may have already read the first half of that conversation here at Bounces during the U.S. Open.
Alas, the planned publication timing of the second half of our chat was one of many things that got derailed by Donald Trump’s visit to watch Alcaraz and Sinner at the men’s final, but I am delighted to bring it to y’all now a few weeks later.
The whole conversation can be heard, unabridged, in the latest episode of No Challenges Remaining, and you can read the second half of it—slightly abridged and edited for length and clarity—below.
We start off with a topic that’s been growing more prominent in recent months: is the obvious dominance of Sinner and Alcaraz at risk of becoming so predictable as to make men’s tennis dull?
Are We Already in a Sinner-Alcaraz Rut?
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Is there a sort of new tedium? You spoke earlier about how there had been this Big Three tedium with that stranglehold they had. It’s obviously still very early in the Alcaraz-Sinner duopoly, but we’re definitely in it. I feel like this [2025 U.S. Open] tournament could have been one day; the first 14 days could have an email, really, because those guys are inevitable. The final will be hugely anticipated, but yeah, I don’t know.
I said this when I was doing something with Chris Clarey about his Nadal book: I went to a lot of French Opens and was unstimulated or bored, frankly, by the men’s side of the draw. It felt inevitable, and therefore not interesting. I remember going to one French Open final—he was playing Thiem—and I was just walking there, like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ I told myself to snap out of it: you’re going to a Grand Slam final to write about tennis for a living, be grateful you little shit.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: One year my Roland Garros preview was just called: ‘These Men Will Not Beat Rafael Nadal.’
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: With 127 names? But really, that is what it was, and it was often meaningfully tedious to live through. Yes, obviously, the numbers are incredible, but living through accumulation numbers isn’t always great.
Now, there is real suspense because when Sinner and Alcaraz play in a final, we don’t know who will win. I think that’s still meaningfully, if not a 50-50 toss-up, still up for grabs.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: So yeah, I’m just wondering: is there now, or will there be, a tedium if there is no third wheel, if there is no new peril, new struggle, new obstacle? Or, is the stuff they produce on court just so electric that it makes up for it? Because it really is good.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: It is really good.
I could take that from two perspectives.
One, from the writer’s perspective, what I can say is that after finishing this book, I felt very grateful that I wrote about that period when my excitement was just so fresh and genuine. Because I think I’m kind of bad at faking excitement about players, and it was just good for my writing process to be experiencing that in real time: the first year that they split the Slams and then no Big Three won one in like over two decades. So that timing felt perfect for me, from a craft perspective.
And then the other half of it is that we, as people who write about tennis professionally, are so keyed in that whatever tedium is there is going to kick in for us, like, probably a full year earlier than for anyone else who’s following the sport more casually.
So I feel like the book was timed well for people who were just kind of figuring out who Jannik Sinner is in the last three, four months. And I really wanted it to be a primer for those people.
And now as we enter what seems like a Sincaraz era that could…I don’t know, I told someone that I didn’t think a different player would win a slam before 2027, which feels pretty safe.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Wow. So you think they’re going to do a whole ‘nother sweep? That would be three straight years!
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: I made a chart—I don’t know if you saw it during Wimbledon—but I basically made a spreadsheet of eras, and it shows that we’re already in it.
We’re just already in it, and I think you said that in our last chat: it’s not the era that’s coming. It’s just the era we’re in.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: We’re living in it, we’re so in it.
And I would just say as someone who loves the brand of tennis that they play against each other, the tedium is not setting in for me. I could wait two weeks if I know I’m going to get the Sincaraz final at the end. It’s just been so good. I mean, Paris: unforgettable. Wimbledon: also entertaining, maybe if not quite to the same level.
I think it’s a little different than, say, Nadal at Roland Garros, because you knew what was waiting for you at the end of the two weeks was just another beatdown, most of the time. So at least there’s something nice gift-wrapped at the with these two guys.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: And there were occasional matches to circle for Nadal: Federer and Djokovic got in the way for him, and made things interesting for him. But yeah, for the most part it, it did feel much more like just going through the motions.
This does not feel that way yet, really, for these two guys. And I think they do—both of them, but Alcaraz especially—have a propensity for creating some highlight that you’ve never seen before. He keeps you on your toes that way, and that’s really satisfying.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, I think it helps that each one has a pretty captivating style of play, in its own way.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: And I feel like Sinner—for me at least—Sinner is the sort of more reliable quantity, whereas it feels like more of a question of where Alcaraz will show up on a day. But Alcaraz is so reliable when he’s showing up to play Sinner.
And even the Wimbledon final which he lost, I felt like he had his opening in the fourth set. Like he had it planned, but just didn’t quite execute. He didn’t hit his Luke Skywalker into the Death Star shot that was all lined up for him, the way he did it in Paris.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, I’m sure he is eager to show that he can do it on a hard court against the hard court master.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Yeah, Jannik stole one of his natural slams, so he wants to get one back.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: There must be a balance in the force.
[Ed.: A reminder that we recorded this during the U.S. Open, which Alcaraz won by beating Sinner in the final]
Predicting the Future of the Present Pair
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Alright, a couple quickfire questions for you.
Which one of these two guys will win a Career Slam first? And just to clarify and remind folks, that would be Alcaraz winning Australia or Sinner winning the French Open—with the obvious caveat that the Australian Open comes before the French Open.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah… [pause] I think it will be Jannik winning on clay.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Next year?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah. I don’t think it’ll take either of them more than three years, at the absolute longest.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Alcaraz has never even made a semi in Australia yet.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: I feel like it’s some scheduling thing. My crack theory is just that I don’t know if his off seasons are the most restful. He’s like collecting all these checks, doing exos, and then he just shows up. And playing on that fast surface, maybe he’s not super keyed in for Australia the way he is for the other Slams. But, I mean, I say that, and it’s not at all difficult for me to imagine winning in a couple months.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Which one of them gets 10 slams first? They’re currently at 5-4 for Alcaraz. [Ed.: Now 6-4]
Giri Nathan, Changeover: I could see... I think it’ll be Alcaraz. I think they do definitely both get to 10.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Who finishes with more?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Alcaraz by a hair. I also think the two-year age gap is worth factoring in there. Neither one has had an injury history that seems worrisome, which is nice.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Alcaraz just missed the 2023 Australian Open.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: He missed Australia with the lower body injury in one of his legs. But in terms of just like recurring, chronic stuff, I feel like nothing too bad so far. Sometimes Alcaraz has right arm stuff, but it seems like he’s been managing that better lately.
Who do you think is going to win more?
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: I personally…how my brain is programmed, I just think Sinner’s better than Alcaraz. Yeah. But Alcaraz clearly wins more and beats Sinner a lot. And it’s where my brain…doesn’t get ‘frustrated’ by it, because I’m not that invested in it, but, when Sinner didn’t win the French Open final, I was like, ‘But he was better!’
I always say—and people have called me on this, which is totally fair—every slam, I was like, ‘Well, Sinner’s going get there, and then we’ll see about at Alcaraz…it could be an adventure.’ And then Alcaraz gets there, too.
But we did this in Wimbledon, especially—and even with the French Open, too, with the Damir Dzumhur of it all—against the classic graph fuck-around-and-find-out correlation graph, there’s all this ‘fuck around’ that Alcaraz has without very much ‘find out.’
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, he hasn’t been finding out.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Whereas with Sinner, there’s really minimal fuck around.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Very much so. I mean, to Carlos’s credit, look at the summer he’s just had.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: And hasn’t dropped a set at the U.S. Open, by the way.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, and he was 39-2 from the start of clay into the start of the U.S. Open. Super consistent.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: That’s not fuck around, so I feel like I’m projecting this thing that’s not really fair on to him.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit of hangover of the narrative, which was I think accurate for previous parts of his career. But to your point, I think the fact that Jannik holds serve the way he does and can get so many free points, winning tennis matches is a slightly simpler proposition. And I could see the argument, now that he’s proved it on grass, that he might just rack up more of these.
I mean I’m not going to say he has an Alcaraz problem, because I think it’s a very balanced rivalry.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: But his biggest issue is Alcaraz.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah and it was about to be five in a row [if Alcaraz had won at Wimbledon].
These Two vs. the Big Three
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: One more sort of hot-takey thing: will either of them catch Federer at 20 major titles?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Ooooooh. My current hypothesis is that the game is getting more and more physical and the tour is more and more unrelenting. I don’t think either of these guys are going to want to go long enough to meet those records.
I could be totally wrong; I’m just projecting a little bit based on the kind of the burnout comments that Carlos makes, and then Jannik just seems like...I don’t know.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: I mean, I hope they’re not looking at that. I hope that they don’t have that even inside of their mind.
That’s what really bothered me about the Alcaraz Netflix documentary, this constant comparing against Nadal. They were pushing back on it but still using it as a framework the whole time. It’s just not fair. They had this line he said that they kept using multiple times: ‘I want to sit at the table with them.’ But in what world do you need to be winning 20 slams to be considered a success to yourself? It’s so unfair.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: There’s kind of a throwaway line where I’m like ‘Maybe these guys are too well-adjusted to even want to do something like that.’ But definitely one of the goals in the book was to describe and appreciate them on their own terms without projecting frames from the past. Because tennis is such a nostalgic sport, and for their sake I don’t want that. They’re interesting characters, in their own right.
Alcaraz’s Crowning Glory
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: A couple of individual topic things about them.
The much discussed one is Alcaraz’s hair. He showed up at his first match, and I guess practice before the first match, with his hair totally shaved off, with whitish skin underneath, his scalp skin showing. It startled people, and it looked…severe, let’s say.
And I did do an interview with Victor Barber, who’s his hometown barber in Murcia, and he also gets lots of commentary.
You wrote about the hair in the book; I think I quoted your book in the hair article. But yeah, what are your thoughts on Alcaraz hair discourse?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: I mean, I love the hair episode because I think it captures one of my favorite things about Carlos. We’ve joked about this, too: there’s so much, millions of dollars riding on him and riding on his appearance, and he’s still willing to just hand his brother the shaver and just see what happens.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: A wildly unskilled brother, by the way.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, he could put up an Instagram and any barber in like a 500-mile radius would go do it for free.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: He’s in New York City; it’s not like even you’re in Indian Wells or something. He’s in New York City. You can find thousands of Spanish-speaking barbers in New York City.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: That’s why I love writing about the early career: I just love that they’re not quite fully self-conscious and legacy-conscious in that way. It’s so fun to write about them in this phase, and I feel like the hair episode is another great example of him just being a bro. And as I write in the book, he’s got this harem of men surrounding him at all times—so many men— and it just seems like they’re bro-ing out all the time. I love the exact quote Alcaraz said [about his brother’s attempt]: ‘He misunderstood with the machine.’ That’s an all time Alcarazism for me.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: That was my question: ‘What happened to your hair? What happened here?’ And I love how betrayed he was by Tiafoe talking shit behind his back. After Tiafoe said something like, ‘…aerodynamic?’ but didn’t say it was bad to his face, but then afterward in press he was like ‘Yo, that’s awful.’ And of course Alcaraz was like ‘He’s lying!’ He’s lying!’ He didn’t even say this.
So it was just a funny, funny moment, and also good to have that kind of nonsense.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, I think it was healthy.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: It was a first-week story about Alcaraz besides him just winning everything. You can’t sustain just that; you need some nonsense factor.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: And it was about as smooth as he’s ever moved through the first four matches at a Slam.
It was very important for me to complicate just like the top-line narrative on both these guys. I think with Carlos it’s that he’s happy-go-lucky, ‘It’s just a dream to be able to play tennis’—whatever. We saw him smash his racket in Cincinnati. Jannik, I’ve seen him answer questions in a very humane and warm way at times, too. I just think like we get this flattened view of them, but they are human beings, and we’ll see more and more of that as their careers and lives mature.
Processing Sinner’s Clostebol Stumble
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: You said ‘complicated,’ which reminded me that I didn’t really hit this note as hard as I probably should have: three quarters of the way through your reporting on the tour, there’s this bombshell that comes out about Sinner that also had been going on behind the scenes for months.
I was reading back through your book today and you said it’s somewhat of a indictment or at least assessment of tennis journalism that nothing about it had leaked. I wasn’t on the tour in 2024 much at all; a lot of people who were just don’t have the access, and this stuff is very closely guarded.
Anyway, so when Jannik Sinner had his positive test revealed and immediately got the ‘no fault or negligence’ ruling—go where you want with this—how did that affect your writing of the book? How does that affect how you see Jannik Sinner and his success? And how does it affect how do you see his present?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, in terms of how I processed it when it was happening, it was very…lucky, is one way to put it, but I happened to be in the airport flying from Cincinnati to New York on the same morning as him, and got to observe his team, how they were acting, what they were eating and drinking, and what the vibe was. I did very briefly talk to them, to try to feel, assess the emotional tenor of that conversation was; that’s a fun episode in the book.
But I wanted to have it play out in the book as it did chronologically in the season. So there was kind of a craft question: most people opening the book probably know something about Jannik Sinner having a doping issue, so do you want to lead the book off with some of the things we all know about it, or do you want it to hit later?
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: And it’s an omniscience thing, right? Do you want to mention that chronologically at Indian Wells?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, exactly. What I ended up doing was having it hit at the moment of the season where it actually went public. But then also, where I felt it was kind of intellectually honest to do so, foreshadowing something weird playing out behind the scenes.
Because after the fact, he talked about the sleepless nights he was having at Wimbledon; you see him play this quarterfinal against Medvedev and he looks like a ghost and he has to get his pulse taken in the middle of the match. The stress of the bureaucracy had been taking a physical toll on him, too, I think, and I was foreshadowing that a little bit, but not hitting it too hard.
But yeah, I tried to handle it as thoroughly as I felt I could with the information we had at the time. We didn’t know yet about the WADA appeal to CAS; we found out just in time that I could squeeze a little bit more into the book at the end.
But in terms of how it made me see him differently: I mean, I’ve read the tribunal report a couple times. I’ve written every possible theory about micro-doping and what not, and masking agents in doping. And I just came away from it really thinking the risk-reward calculus makes no sense for someone like Jannik Sinner, to like try to gain an advantage in this way when clearly we can the consequences are extremely severe.
So I didn’t think that. And, you know, contemporaneous photos of the guy with the cut on his finger.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Yeah, that mattered a lot.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, that matters a lot, and then producing the receipt for the spray and whatnot. All this stuff, I think it does shore up the case.
I write in the book, and I personally understand, that it feels absurd on its face—like many tennis excuses in the past with regard to banned substances. But when I just look at the whole weight of the evidence, in my book, I don’t think he was deliberately seeking out a performance edge.
And whether that [feeling about the Sinner case] is true of his colleagues is a very different question. I think as recently as Australia, as we talked about, he was like: ‘The vibe is bad in the locker room, I think people are still looking at me different.’ He’s talked about how he figured out who his friends and fake friends were. I think it must’ve been a fairly traumatic period in his life.
But if there’s one thing Jannik Sinner’s good at, it’s compartmentalizing, which is another big theme in this book. And the fact that he just came right back from the WADA suspension—where he wasn’t allowed to train with other ATP people, he had to bring guys out of retirement, only certain courts. This whole episode plays out and then he comes back and immediately just starts making the final of every single tournament.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Yeah, it’s unfortunate, just as the culture of sport that we’ve had in the 21st century and maybe a little before that, when the World No. 1 who is super-dominant tests positive, you can’t immediately think ‘nothing to see here.’
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, right, the optics are too weird.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: And you can’t think it must have nothing to do with his dominance. I remember thinking that when he dominated in Turin last year: ‘it’s weird there’s this pending case and he’s just so much better than everyone else, just soaring above and off-the-charts better than everybody else.’
But to clarify, just to show the work on an earlier point: [Giacomo] Naldi, who was the physiotherapist who allegedly had the cut on his finger, there were photos of him during matches at Indian Wells with a bandage on a finger. So that to me shows the cut-on-finger thing at least was not out of nowhere.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: And then Ferrara, the fitness trainer, was able to produce the receipt from the pharmacy.
I mean the fact that he brought back Ferrara more recently is pretty fascinating.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Yeah, what do you think about that?
Giri Nathan, Changeover: I’m not Jannik Sinner, I don’t know—maybe he’s the best damn fitness trainer in the world?
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: But to reopen this issue...
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Also I just feel like it would be a non-starter for me to bring this spray on a business trip at all; there are plenty of other ways to heal cuts on the human body.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: I think Sinner’s generally been pretty candid about this stuff, but the bringing back Ferrara stuff he’s kind of stonewalled.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, I think to his credit, his candor has helped his case a lot. But he has not talked about the Ferrara stuff, really. And yeah, I mean, he must be really good, I guess, because he cost the Sinner a lot of stress and three months of his career.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: I don’t even know if the question has been asked this way, but I always want to ask: how did you forgive him? That’s like a totally fair question to ask about Ferrara.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: The question I asked last year—and got stonewalled—was, ‘How did you navigate those few months after the mistake and before the revelation of the mistake? It must have been weird touring with these guys.’ And I still would love to know the answer to that question, but as with a lot of things in Jannik Sinner’s life—and with most high-profile sportsmen— you’re just not going to get to the bottom of it.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Well, thank you very much for being on here. You’ve gotten to the bottom of a lot, or at least told a great story in this book of this moment in time. Really well written.
As I write in the blurb on the back of this book—I am a blurber on this book—‘Deftly weaving between awestruck wonderment and playful irreverence, Nathan breathes fresh life into tennis prose—just as Sinner and Alcaraz have done on court, and with just as many jaw-dropping highlights.’
And it’s really true: I had my galley copy of the book, and I was just drawing little hearts all over it when I liked something. There’s just so many highlights and lines you hit, doing these remarkable things with words. I think it’s really cool and impressive.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: So congratulations on the book’s success, I hope it’s been gratifying seeing it out in the world.
Giri Nathan, Changeover: Yeah, it’s felt great. I hope the NCR/Bounces listeners enjoy it, too.
Thank you very much to Giri Nathan for his time, and please do buy his book!
The Laver Cup gave me hope that Taylor Fritz was finally getting to a level where he could occasionally win against Alcaraz, and it made me hope that Sincaraz distancing themselves so much from the others in the top 100 might finally come to a halt, but then the Japan Open happened. I'm a big Taylor fan and it killed me that he couldn't get even a set off Carlos; I don't know if Carlos was just playing lights-out, Taylor needs Agassi as a full-time coach, or if Carlos just did not have any focus during their match at the Laver Cup, maybe because it's just an exhibition.
Side note related to Carlos' personality and his portrayal in the tennis world: the moment in the Tokyo final where he started chiding the umpire for a time violation and was snidely telling the umpire "you've never played tennis in your life!!!" was a brief, interesting lapse (similar to Cincinnati) where he lost his cool. It's sort of startling to see those moments from him. Yes, he's only human, etc etc...
I have the utmost respect for you, Ben. But for you to characterize this era as tedious is a disservice to Sinner and Alcaraz and to your readers. Bored by their dominance? Find other human interest stories to write. There must be many that haven’t been told. It’s difficult as a reader to sympathize with your complaints about tedium, when you get to watch the world’s best players so often. Don’t like the Sinner-Alcaraz narrative? Find other people and issues and use your great reporting skills to illuminate their back stories.