The Year of the Sinner

On the awkwardness of Jannik Sinner's incredibly excellent 2024, and saying the quiet part out loud.

With his 6-4, 6-4 win over Taylor Fritz in the final of the ATP Finals today in Turin, top-ranked Jannik Sinner capped a generationally great effort: his 2024 season was far the most successful season in men’s tennis achieved by anyone born after the Big Three—or, put another way, born after Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” (June 12, 1987).

Sinner is the first player in an even longer time period than that—since Ivan Lendl in 1986—to win the ATP Finals without losing a single set.

[Do I mention it here? Feels too early…]

Speaking of sets, Jannik Sinner has remarkably gone this entire season¹ without losing a single match in straight sets, something that hasn’t been done in an entire ATP season since Roger Federer’s incredible 81-4 run in 2005. On the women’s side, Serena Williams most recently did it in her incredible 78-4 campaign in the 2013 WTA season.

Both Federer’s 2005 and Serena’s 2013 also featured the player winning “only” two major titles like Sinner did this year, which I think has dampened some of the exuberance about his season, even if his dethroning of Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open was era-shifting, and his romp at the U.S. Open was emphatic.

[Or should I get into it here? I mean it’s about what “dampened some of the exuberance about his season”…but no, still so many numbers left to reel off...]

Because when you compare Sinner to the others at the top of men’s tennis this year, he has no peers in what he did both in terms of quantity and quality. Sinner won the most ATP titles on tour with eight, the most Masters 1000 titles with three, and tied Alcaraz with two major titles. The $4,881,500 in prize money he earned for going undefeated in Turin bumped his prize money for the year to $16,914,435; that gaudy total doesn’t even include the additional $6 million he earned at the Six Kings exhibition.

Sinner did all this winning with remarkable efficiency, losing just six matches all year:

ATP Top 20 win-loss records after ATP Finals, before Davis Cup Finals.

I’m not sure the raw numbers do justice to how much better 92.1 percent is than the rest, so consider this: Novak Djokovic has the second-best win percentage in men’s tennis this year at 80.4 percent; for his win percentage to pull equal to Sinner’s, he’d have to add another sixty-eight wins to his win column. The comparison is even more stark if you look at the next spot down in the ATP rankings: Alexander Zverev is the second-ranked player in the ATP Rankings as this season ends; for his win percentage to pull equal to Sinner’s, he’d have to add one-hundred-and-seventy-seven wins to his total to offset his hugely higher number of losses. That’s how much better Sinner’s quality was than Zverev’s, and how much cleaner his season was than the rest of the field.

[“Cleaner”? Come on, they’re gonna figure out what you’re trying to avoid...]

For all the focus on Sinner’s hard court dominance—going 50-3 for an even sparklier 94.3 win percentage—he was hardly a slouch on the other surfaces this year. Sinner went 11-2 on clay during an injury-plagued stretch, reaching the semifinals of Monte Carlo and the French Open where he lost in five sets to Carlos Alcaraz; Sinner then went 9-1 on grass, winning the 500-level title at Halle and reaching the Wimbledon quarterfinals where he lost in five sets to Daniil Medvedev.

With this all-court résumé, his consistency, and unflappability—and the fact that none of his current rivals are anywhere near as reliable—I would contend that Jannik Sinner’s 2025 holds the best pre-season chance of an elusive Calendar Grand Slam that we’ve seen for a long time. Yes, Novak Djokovic came very close to sweeping the set in both 2021 and 2023, but Djokovic figured to have to deal with a Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros in both those years; no such obvious roadblock looms similarly for Sinner on the calendar at this juncture. Djokovic was also in his mid-30s both times and his physical dominance should have been approaching its expiration date; Jannik Sinner is still just 23 and only seems to be getting fitter, faster, and stronger. While physically fresh, Sinner also seems as mentally mature as could be hoped for in a prospective champion, able to stay focused throughout a year fraught with off-court challenges.

[“Off-court challenges”? Let’s be direct...]

Sinner’s star only seems to be rising in Italy, where his endorsement earnings keep pace with his on-court winnings, and the ATP is navigating its course by the light of that star: During the trophy ceremony, ATP chairman Andrea Gaudenzi announced that the ATP Finals would be spending an additional five years in Italy after Turin’s deal runs out next year, keeping them in the home country of Sinner (and perhaps not coincidentally the home country of Gaudenzi and ATP chief executive Massimo Calvelli) through 2030.

The next Italian host city has not been confirmed, but many on the ground have heard buzz about Milan taking over once it’s done hosting the 2026 Winter Olympics. Sinner, whose hometown in northeast Italy is even closer to Milan than it is to Turin, figures to be a tentpole of that tenure; so too could the bumper crop of Italian talent that includes Lorenzo Musetti, Flavio Cobolli, perhaps a resurgent Matteo Berrettini, and a whole bunch of Italian names we don’t yet know.

As Sinner lifted his shiny silver trophy following Gaudenzi’s announcement, the crowd cheered, and a flurry of blue and white confetti swirled around him and the entire scene.

It was a fairytale moment for men’s tennis in Italy.

[But are fairytales real???]

OK, I shouldn’t ignore the bracketed voices any longer: my obvious, overwhelming concern is that the flurry of confetti that ended Jannik Sinner’s historically successful 2024 season could, with time, reveal itself to have actually been a blizzard of asterisks that will frost over everything he achieved.

We live in an era in which, unfortunately but unavoidably, superhuman sporting feats have been sadly saddled with side-eyeability. It is hugely, hugely uncomfortable, therefore, for Jannik Sinner to have compiled his generationally great campaign in the same year in which he twice tested positive for the banned substance clostebol. As WADA is appealing the “no fault or negligence” verdict that Sinner received from the ITIA’s tribunal back in August to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), we still don’t yet know what Sinner’s ultimate fate or determination of culpability will be, and nor is it clear when that verdict will be issued.

The biggest threat to Sinner winning the Calendar Grand Slam in 2025—the possibility I gushed about earlier in this piece—may well not be any opponent, but that he is sidelined from competition during one of the four majors next year by a ban.

Will Sinner be suspended? I don’t know. That said, I don’t think WADA would have brought this high-profile appeal if they didn’t think there was a strong chance of success at CAS (which is consistently favorable to appellants, you’ll recall).

Should Sinner be suspended? I also don’t know the answer to that. His original lack of fault, it was clear from reading the ITIA tribunal’s decision, hinged on a carefully curated story about the banned substance being applied to the injured finger of his therapist, Giacomo Naldi, who then only inadvertently transferred a small amount of the substance to Sinner through a barehanded massage with unwashed hands. (Gross.)

The success of the Sinner defense further hinged on a crucial detail his side deftly included in their recounting of the scenario: they claimed Sinner had diligently asked Naldi if he had put any substances on his injured finger, and that Naldi answered saying that he had not:

According to the defense, Naldi only used the clostebol spray for the first time two days later, changing the answer to the question Sinner had dutifully asked before. That precise sequence of events was crucial to Sinner being awarded the minimal “No Fault or Negligence” verdict by the tribunal.

Did these events actually happen as described? Did Sinner actually ask the physiotherapist that pivotal question in that pivotal moment? Only the people involved know for sure.

I have enjoyed watching Jannik Sinner, the savior of my #TennisNeedsGingers campaign, ever since I first saw him in Rome in 2019. I’ve enjoyed covering him and interacting with him as well. But, frankly, I have no idea at this stage whether to believe that Jannik Sinner is/was performance enhancing or not, through clostebol or other means. And unless you are Jannik Sinner or a member of his tight inner circle reading this, neither do you. As I said when I wrote about Maria Sharapova’s Hall of Fame candidacy, I cannot profess certain confidence in the innocence of any athlete.

It’s even tougher to have any confidence in the case of Jannik Sinner in 2024: Sinner tested positive for a banned substance twice this year, and he’s also been blowing past the competition this year. I don’t know if Sinner deserves a suspension; I do believe it requires a suspension of disbelief to be convinced that these two things coinciding couldn’t possibly be related.

They make all sorts of amazing Italian sportscars in and around Turin, you probably know, and that industry’s proximity felt appropriate as Sinner did circles around the rest of the field this week. Watching an Italian sportscar-type player miles ahead of the pack and lapping the competition is amazing; watching them do it shortly after they twice tested positive for a banned substance in their tank is, at best, awkward.

Sinner argues that he absorbed that trace amount of clostebol accidentally, which, again, only he and his team can know for sure. What we do know is that the drug wasn’t banned accidentally: substances like clostebol are banned because they measurably enhance performance; a measurably elite performance from a player who was caught with a banned substance in his system might not be unrelated to that.

Could it be a coincidence? Sure. But can we be sure? We cannot.

Jannik Sinner testing out his Turin shirt during a practice at the 2024 U.S. Open. (Photo by Hameltion)

1. Sinner is still set to play Davis Cup next week, which will put that record back in potential jeopardy.