Best of Three: Sinner-Djokovic, Sabalenka-Zheng, and a China Comeback
Sinner rolls in Shanghai, mirrored again by Sabalenka in Wuhan, and Zheng Qinwen puts Chinese tennis on better footing than ever.
Welcome to Best of Three, which will hopefully become a regular feature here at Bounces to recap busy moments in tennis…such as this morning which featured two 1000-level finals!
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First Set: Jannik Sinner Doesn’t Blink Against Djokovic
ATP No. 1 Jannik Sinner won his third Masters 1000 title of the season today, adding to his trophies in Miami and Cincinnati with a win at the Shanghai Rolex Masters, beating Novak Djokovic 7-6(4), 6-3 in the final.
Highlighted by major peaks in Melbourne and New York, Sinner is putting together one of the best ATP seasons in recent memory. He’s 65-6 on the season overall (91.5 percent) and 45-3 on hard courts (93.6 percent). By reaching the final in Shanghai, Sinner guaranteed himself the year-end No. 1 ranking. If it weren’t for that pesky positive test—and the Damoclean specter of the pending appeal at CAS—this would have really been a dream run for Sinner. Instead, it currently feels like one of those impending doom TikToks.
But Sinner hasn’t been remotely distractable on court. The big story in this final on Sunday wasn’t just that Sinner has won four of his last five against Djokovic, but that Sinner can stare down Djokovic and beat him in a category that’s one of Djokovic’s biggest strengths: his intense focus.
Whereas Carlos Alcaraz has beaten Djokovic in consecutive Wimbledon finals through combustible chaos—producing enough fireworks to make up for his flameouts—Sinner has burned through Djokovic by being a steady flame that didn’t flicker. For their second straight match against Djokovic, perhaps the greatest returner of all time in men’s tennis, Sinner didn’t face a single break point.
Sinner is the first opponent to ever achieve this in consecutive matches against Djokovic, and the first to do it twice in one season.
That cluster at the bottom of the chart is obviously a concerning trend for Djokovic: this is the fourth time this season that he failed to generate a single break point opportunity. That didn’t happen for Djokovic once from 2018-2023, across 354 matches (thanks to @JeuSetMaths for doing the addition there).
Overall, this was probably still a good week for Djokovic in what’s been his weakest season in a long time. He still hasn’t won a title outside of the Olympics this year—his title count remains stuck at a restive 99—but he did earn his second win this year over a top-10 opponent when he beat Taylor Fritz in the semifinals.
A few weeks ago Djokovic had been saying he was unlikely to finish out the rest of the ATP season, but I suspect this week was good enough to keep him going. If nothing else, the 600 ranking points he earned for reaching the Shanghai final improved his standing in the Race to Turin to sixth. If he qualifies for that lucrative tournament, it’s hard to see him not showing up.
What comes after that, and how long Djokovic keeps going, is the obvious question.
“I don’t know what future brings,” Djokovic said after his loss in Shanghai today. “I’ll just, you know, try to kind of go with the flow to see how I feel in a given moment. I still plan to compete and play next season and, yeah, let’s see how far I go.”
How motivated should Djokovic be to keep going? He’s 37 and already won everything there is to win, after all. And with all his biggest rivals now officially having called it a day, Djokovic could feel increasingly lonely out there.
“It’s still a shock when it came officially,” Djokovic said this week of Nadal’s retirement news. “Also for Roger a few years ago as well when he announced retirement. And Andy, as well, this year. I mean, it’s a bit overwhelming for me, to be honest. I don’t know what to make out of it. I still enjoy competing, but part of me left with them. A big part of me.”
Next up for Djokovic is the lucrative “Six Kings” exhibition in Saudi Arabia, where he will join Sinner, Nadal, Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev, and Holger Rune in competing for an absurdly big prize of $6 million.
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Second Set: Aryna Sabalenka and Zheng Qinwen Have Their First Real Battle
Aryna Sabalenka isn’t yet the WTA No. 1 (she’s nice and close, only 69 points behind Iga Swiatek in Monday’s rankings), but almost everything else in her 2024 results have mirrored Sinner’s.
Both Sabalenka and Sinner were coinciding champions this year at the Australian Open, Cincinnati, U.S. Open, and now this weekend in China, with Sabalenka winning WTA 1000 Wuhan a couple hours after Sinner triumphed at his ATP 1000 event, 450 miles to the east in Shanghai.
Sabalenka had to work longer for her win: in a battle over two hours and 40 minutes, Sabalenka won 6-3, 5-7, 6-3 over local favorite Zheng Qinwen. It was Sabalenka’s third consecutive title in Wuhan, albeit with the previous two coming long ago—pre-pandemic—in 2018 and 2019.
This was the fourth match between Sabalenka and Zheng, and the fourth win for Sabalenka, but it still felt like a considerable milestone result. Their three previous matches were all on big stages, but this final in Wuhan was the first one that wasn’t a total anticlimax: Sabalenka had beaten Zheng 6-1, 6-4 in the 2023 U.S. Open quarterfinal; 6-3, 6-2 in the 2024 Australian Open final; and 6-1, 6-2 in the 2024 U.S. Open quarterfinal.
Until the second set of today’s final, Zheng had never even once broken Sabalenka’s serve. But once she finally broke Sabalenka for the first time today, Zheng broke Sabalenka four more times for good measure.
After losing the second, Sabalenka swung momentum back in her direction early in the third set, breaking twice for a 3-0 lead. Zheng pulled it tighter with a spectacular point, but Sabalenka weathered the storm—and the partisan crowd—to hang on.
Despite the loss, there’s no doubt that Zheng is rounding into a reliable top player. Her run to the final in Wuhan put Zheng in pole position for the final spot in the WTA Finals field in Riyadh next month, just edging ahead of Emma Navarro.
Being a top player in this era of women’s tennis would seem to guarantee Zheng a lot more big matches against Sabalenka; after today’s tight battle, now this match-up are something fans can look forward to with excitement.
Third Set: China Has Gained Traction on the Tennis Map
Li Na, the hometown hero who was the original reason Wuhan secured a premier WTA tournament, retired just before the inaugural 2014 edition of the Wuhan tournament, which was a major blow to Wuhan’s raison d'être as a destination for the WTA Tour. I wrote a few days ago about how Wuhan was initially a punchline when it arrived onto the WTA calendar.
And if it was lost to history, it might’ve stayed that way: after the triple blows of the Wuhan-originating Covid-19 pandemic, the collapse in the Chinese real estate market, and the disappearance of Peng Shuai, it wasn’t clear that Wuhan would make it back onto the calendar after its four-year absence.
But in 2024, Wuhan was back in women’s tennis, and daresay better than ever. With another hometown hero arriving in recent Olympic gold medalist Zheng Qinwen, Wuhan—and the broader “WTAsia” strategy—seems to be delivering like never before.
When the enormous 15,000 stadium was built in Wuhan in 2016—priced at $150 million—it seemed overambitious to say the least, given how sparse attendance had been at the tournament in early editions. But with Zheng now a bona fide star—and a young one who just turned 22 last week to boot—the demand seems to finally match the supply. It had been similar for Zheng’s matches in last week’s China Open, too, with loud chants of “Zheng Qinwen - jiayou!” ringing out around the stadiums.
Crowds in Shanghai were supportive of Djokovic throughout the ATP tournament— Djokovic is more popular in China than in any country outside the Balkans, probably—but the sound of the stadiums for Zheng was next-level.
She’s not just a star within a tennis bubble: Zheng became the first athlete, male or female, to grace the cover of Vogue China this week. The magazine has been published since 2005, and China has hosted two Olympics since then, but no athlete until Zheng had broken through like this.
Zheng is the lodestar, by far, but she’s not alone: the primetime all-Chinese semifinal in Wuhan between Zheng Qinwen and Wang Xinyu may have been the biggest all-Chinese match in WTA history.
These are obviously positive stories for women’s tennis—filling a huge stadium for a women-only tournament is nothing to take for granted—but there are of course still reasons for tennis China to feel precarious. Though the WTA returned to China last year, the disturbing Peng Shuai saga still remains uncomfortably unresolved; it sure would have been nice if Peng had casually shown up at one of these tournaments, freely able to interact with WTA organizers and her former peers, but she remained out of sight.
Wider political perils still loom in China, too, with regional conflicts over Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea all still simmering.
Promising momentum in China has derailed before for women’s tennis: Remember that 2019 was supposed to be the first year of a ten-year occupancy for the WTA Finals in Shenzhen, a residency that would still have many years left if it were still intact. Instead, only one edition of the event was ultimately completed, and even that one was preceded by the Shenzhen Bay Sports Center being used to stage paramilitary vehicles, poised to pounce on nearby Hong Kong.
The collapse of Shenzhen as a viable host city for a series of different reasons left the WTA Tour’s showcase tournament orphaned and adrift, bouncing from Guadalajara to Fort Worth to Cancun before finally settling for the first of a three-year deal next month…in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Depending on how things for women’s tennis in its first trip to Saudi Arabia, both on court and off court, maybe the WTA will leave eager to give China another try.
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