The Jannik Sinner Experience
In an article from August 20, 2006, David Foster Wallace referred to them as “Federer Moments.”
These were those moments when the mouth no longer responded to any command, and his muscles surrendered to the wonder of what his eyes were witnessing.
Transcendence made flesh in that rectangular amphitheater where mortals gather to witness the incredible.
Jannik Sinner is not the divine. He does not belong to another world; he is not sculpted in the empyrean where he envelops us all with his ethereal aura.
He is the bearer of something we are much closer to, yet which our withered arms can no longer reach.
It is the affirmation of the self, the celebration of life, the will to power that drives him with inexhaustible force to continuously overcome his own limits.
Jannik Sinner is the torchbearer of Nietzsche’s “Master Morality,” and in this spectrum, what is defined positively has its own subsisting dignity; it does not depend on what its antithesis might represent, because it is good to make of this life a radiating light, and ressentiment, the mediocre, belongs to the inferior, and does not touch him.
The opponent is not an enemy, but rather himself a bearer of the value system that elevates the Spirit.
Defeat is not a vile destination, but part of the process, that rough edge that strengthens the armor, making it impregnable.
Spite and envy do not belong to those who chase the ball from one side of the court to the other in an attempt to revive and tone that uniquely human strength that tears down physical and motivational barriers.
Every point deserves to be played, completely detached from the overall score, because every moment deserves to be lived intensely in the hic et nunc.
Paris, French Open 2025. The red dust has been swirling up continuously for five hours and twenty-nine minutes.
Rafael Nadal has lifted the cup on the Philippe Chatrier Court fourteen times.
That court has clear Iberian connotations that contaminate even the atmosphere, making it feel like a bullfight.
Slowly the dust settles, while the shouts of the spectators rise for the winner, Carlos Alcaraz.
The Spaniard takes the center of the court after saving three match points in the fourth set.
Sinner, hunched over himself, his gaze glazed over as he recreates in his mind the scenes of those missed opportunities, and finally that stretched down-the-line forehand that pierces him without the possibility of a reply.
The congratulations to be given to the opponent, the announcer who explosively calls out his rival’s name.
Before that gaze are the marks left by the ball on the court, marks that determine even more clearly who has won and who has lost.
He will say in the press conference, “If you only look at the sad part, you never bounce back.”
The work that is carried out, therefore, is not done with the aim of deserving that trophy, because absurdly, all the opponents in the draw could feel ill and withdraw, and he would win it anyway.
The uninterrupted training sessions that will take place from that fateful day onward will serve to surpass his own limits, to unleash the will to power in the most human form of celebrating life, his own, of which Jannik has no intention of being a spectator.
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Wimbledon, a month later. I could begin by talking about the surface of the court to inflate the symbolic substrate that lies behind this tournament in reference to Sinner, and in fact, I will, because I surrender to romanticism.
Grass, the thriving of nature, in a vague sense; the manifestation of a healthy, strong terrain, in a strict sense.
The stage where David Foster Wallace’s theophany took place, where the Swiss, posing as Myron’s “Discobolus,” let go of his one-handed backhand, studding the firmament of the best eight times, stamping the name Roger Federer inside “The Champions’ Corridor” just as many times.
Sinner finds himself facing Carlos Alcaraz again in the final.
If the South Tyrolean looks in the mirror, he sees in himself the limit to overcome, but hovering over this challenge is the imposing presence of the one who has already won twice on this surface (at only twenty-two years old), marking his territory empowered by the crushing delivered on Parisian soil.
But this is not about revenge; this is not about returning the favor by externalizing the cruelty suffered a month prior, about feasting on the carcass of the defeated.
“I can” is the mantra that, in my opinion, Sinner keeps repeating aloud inside his head.
And he plays point by point, even down 40 to 0, as if he were playing to steal the serve, the game, the set, the match.
The projection towards the present moment allows him to sway among the very fine blades of grass of the “Centre Court,” to run and slow down the grip of gravity on the ball, catechized by the strength of one who, deaf under the silent eyes of almost fifteen thousand people in the stands, lets himself be struck in a dance that alternates between drop shots and supersonic groundstrokes.
The first set goes to Alcaraz, who points his finger to his ear and rallies the fired-up spectators after pulling off a half-split backhand recovery on a stretched down-the-line forehand by Sinner that recalled the winner he suffered from the same player at Roland Garros.
The Italian champion goes to sit down. Points are played shot for shot, and that one, along with the first set lost 4–6 while dropping his serve, is already in the past.
Now, it is how he will play the first point in return at the beginning of the second set that will establish how close he is to overcoming his own limit, and then the next point, and then another still.
One break per set was enough for him to go up 2–1 in the overall count, with the Spaniard complaining to his corner about the opponent’s total dominance from the baseline, and Sinner who, in religious silence, algorithmically processes the steps he lacks to seal his definitive consecration — to himself, to the athlete and man who makes the present the only moment of elevation to which a human being can aspire, conceding, for every point won, only a swing of the racket as a sign of timid jubilation towards his box and his family.
Allowing myself a digression that I consider necessary, the experience I am recounting is inevitably mediated by the screen, which surely affected how I perceived the phenomenon I am describing, but the last game of this fourth set managed to break the flat rectangular barrier of the television screen to hit me right in the chest in an apotheosis of winners and cynical calculation.
Sinner broke his opponent’s serve in the previous game, and therefore finds himself serving for the match.
The first two points are opposites: a long rally with an inside-out backhand by Alcaraz that ends in the tramlines;
a one-two punch by Sinner with a down-the-line backhand to close out Alcaraz’s return on the South Tyrolean’s serve.
Gaze down, Jannik walks towards the baseline to serve from the right.
First serve in, the ball seems hypnotized by the way it is magnetically attracted to Sinner’s racket, who turns his opponent into a windshield wiper as he approaches the net to close the rally in three shots.
40–0: serving for the match. Second serve in, excellent return by the Spaniard, a backhand that ends up in the net.
40–15: serving for the match again. Time dilates.
For me, a man made and defined by the morality of ressentiment, by the desire for revenge of the underdogs, by the good that is born in contrast with those values that represent the affirmation of the self, the ghosts of Paris return to present themselves.
Jannik Sinner is in the present. A powerful first serve down the “T”. Alcaraz touches it, but it’s not enough.
Sinner raises both arms, like the Vitruvian Man. The End.
