The South Tyrolean is already being compared to Roger Federer. He could dominate tennis in the coming years.
Modesty and closeness to the earth: Jannik Sinner is the most popular figure in men’s tennis.
David Payr / Life
Perhaps January 28, 2024 will one day have a similar significance in Italian sport and even in the country’s history as July 11, 1982. At that time, Italy became world football champions with a 3-1 final win against Germany in Madrid. Alessandro Altobelli, Marco Tardelli and Paolo Rossi scored the goals. These names are now common knowledge in Italy.
That victory in Madrid was about more than just football for the Italians. He freed the country from the period of post-fascism and terrorism that had hung over the nation like a leaden bell for years. The assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the bomb attack in the Bologna train station with 85 deaths, the crash of Itavia Flight 870 near Ustica with 80 victims – all of this weighed on the joy of life and the self-confidence of this proud country.
There are actually people who think today that January 28, 2024 could have a similar significance in Italian historiography as July 11 in the summer of 1982. Even if Italy and its population are doing much better today than they did back then.
But what the hell happened on January 28, 2024 that has this football-mad nation drawing comparisons to that history-making event, the World Cup title? On January 28th, Jannik Sinner won his first Grand Slam title in Melbourne. In the final he beat the Russian Daniil Medvedev 3:6, 3:6, 6:4, 6:4, 6:3 and became the first Italian since Adriano Panatta in Roland-Garros in 1976 to win a Grand Slam among men title won.
It’s done: Sinner wins his first Grand Slam tournament.
A domestically significant event
The significance of a major victory in tennis does not come close to winning a world championship title in football. And yet Sinner’s triumph had a significance for Italy, at least domestically, that went beyond sport. He allowed the north and south of the country, which traditionally view each other with suspicion, to move a little closer together, at least temporarily. The enthusiastic football nation, in which calcio is a kind of unofficial substitute religion, discovered his passion for tennis.
Italian and tennis? For decades, this was anything but a love affair. The sport lived primarily in holiday resorts along the Mediterranean coast and in the mountains of German-speaking South Tyrol, where tourists spend their holidays and Sinner has its roots. For decades, the region felt more inclined towards the north anyway. People speak German and feel closer to Austria than Rome.
To understand why Sinner brought Italy closer together with his success and why this is extraordinary, you have to know the history of South Tyrol. The German-speaking population of this northernmost region in the Bel Paese was subjected to massive repression by the Italian government for decades. Rome began a forced Italianization. German-speaking state employees were laid off and employees from Italian provinces took over their positions. The names of German-speaking villages were replaced by Italian ones. Sinner’s home community of Sexten was renamed Sesto, and the South Tyrol region became Alto Adige. Tens of thousands of Italians were settled in the state capital of Bolzano, Bolzano, and German was banned as a language in schools, kindergartens and authorities.
Throughout its history, South Tyrol has always fluctuated back and forth between Austria and Italy. After the Second World War, the region was granted autonomous status by the victorious powers in the 1946 Treaty of Paris. But the Italian government ignored the order and did not implement it. The community of Graun in the border triangle between Italy, Austria and Switzerland is a memorial to this time. An entire village was forcibly relocated and had to make way for a reservoir to produce electricity. To this day, the church tower of the flooded community rises from Lake Reschen as a postcard subject and memorial to this dark chapter of history.
In the mid-1950s there was armed resistance against Italy in South Tyrol with bombings and attacks. Italy took relentless action against the resistance fighters. Only after Austria contacted the UN Security Council was South Tyrol’s autonomous status officially ratified in 1972.
The old resentments have not completely disappeared to this day. Instead of a Röstigraben, there is a kind of Parmesan canon in Italy that runs along the language border south of Bolzano. The Italian lifestyle remains frowned upon in large parts of the South Tyrolean population to this day. Old Tyrolean traditions are maintained to the present day. German is still spoken predominantly. Only in Bolzano is the proportion of the Italian-speaking population higher than that of the German-speaking population. Around 65 percent of all residents there speak Italian, in the rest of the region it is almost 30 percent.
This excursion into the history of the region is necessary to understand what Jannik Sinner and his first Grand Slam title in January triggered. The freckled boy with the red messy hairstyle from the north brought an entire country closer together. He is now a nationally popular figure, like the World Cup top scorer Paolo Rossi, the ski racer Alberto Tomba, the motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi or the cyclist Marco Pantani before him, who have united the country regardless of their origins.
Proof of Sinner’s popularity are the viewing ratings. With Sinners Matches, the state TV broadcaster RAI achieves values that Italy has previously only seen from the national football team. His final at the ATP Finals in Turin last November against Novak Djokovic was watched by over five million people. Two weeks ago, 1.087 million watched his semi-final in Monte Carlo against Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas. The Serie A match between Inter Milan and Cagliari was the most watched game of the round and attracted 952,000 spectators on the same weekend.
Sinner’s popularity has helped him rise not only in the sporting but also in the social rankings. After winning the Davis Cup with Italy last November, he was received by President Sergio Mattarella at the Quirinal Palace in Rome on his return and gave a short speech to the Italian government. To the annoyance of his South Tyrolean compatriots in Italian. At the end of January he brought the Norman Brooks Challenge Trophy, the Australian Open trophy, to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Palazzo Chigi. Pope Francis congratulated him on his success with a message from the Vatican.
Great honor: Jannik Sinner is welcomed at the Quirinal.
The question immediately arose in the local media in South Tyrol: “Why does Sinner celebrate with those in Rome and not here with us?” Alex Vittur is a former professional tennis player who did not rise above position 605 in the rankings and ended his active career in November 2012 at the age of just 20. He has been looking after Jannik Sinner as a manager for more than a decade and is one of his most important contacts in tennis.
Like Sinner, Vittur comes from South Tyrol. In an interview with the Milanese daily newspaper “Corriere della Sera” last November, Sinner said: “Alex is the person who knows me, my family and my history in tennis best. I’ve been working with him since I was twelve. Thanks to him I went to Bordighera to see Riccardo Piatti.”
Vittur speaks with great pride of the boy he made great. But he doesn’t want to be quoted. He told “NZZ am Sonntag” that Jannik should be the center of interest. But like most people, he also emphasizes the modesty and down-to-earth nature of the boy, who grew up just a stone’s throw from the Austrian border. They are a large part of the enormous sympathy that characterizes him and is shown to him in Italy, but also in most other corners of the world.
Compare with his idol Roger Federer
In this respect, Sinner is already reminiscent of Roger Federer, whom he describes as his great role model. The two have never played against each other. When Sinner played his first games on the ATP tour as a 16-year-old in 2018, Federer was already in the final stages of his great career. Nevertheless, the parallels between the two are unmistakable. Family ties are important to them. Like Federer’s parents, Sinner’s parents also have both feet firmly on the ground. His father is a cook, his mother runs an inn with a few rooms in the Val Fiscalina, which has become a kind of pilgrimage site for Sinner’s followers.
Sinner has a stepbrother two years older than him, whom his parents adopted because they thought Sinner’s mother couldn’t get pregnant. Stefan Peer is a journalist at the “Dolomiten-Zeitung”, the region’s largest German-language publication based in Bolzano. He has followed Jannik Sinner’s career from his early youth. “Sinner inspires the Italians like Alberto Tomba or Valentino Rossi before him. He always behaves in an exemplary manner and never throws a bat. “Maybe he’s a little too nice to his opponents at times,” says Peer.
This promptly proved to be Sinner’s undoing in one of his two defeats this season. A month ago he lost the semi-finals of the Masters 1000 tournament in Monte Carlo against Stefanos Tsitsipas because he did not challenge an obvious double fault from the Greek. If the chair referee had given the ball out, Sinner would have taken a 4-1 lead and would most likely have won the match. Even Tsitsipas couldn’t help but say after the match that his ball was clearly out of bounds.
Sinner was just as talented on the skis as he was on the tennis court. Before he decided to take up the racket, he was Italian junior champion in giant slalom. He recently explained why he chose tennis over skiing in a big story in the fashion magazine “Vogue”: “As a boy, I often won skiing and almost never won tennis. I wasn’t physically ready for the competition. But then I chose tennis because you can lose a point and still win the match. If you make a serious mistake on the skis, you’re gone.”
Sinner doesn’t make too many mistakes on the tennis court anymore. Today he is looked after by the Italian Simone Vagnozzi and the Australian Darren Cahill. Many others claim a piece of his success and wanted to have accompanied him at least a few steps along his path.
Last week Jannik Sinner played in the tournament in Madrid before withdrawing due to hip problems before the match against Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime. The 22-year-old has won 28 of the 30 games he has played this season. Now his body is rebelling just before the home tournament in Rome and he had to cancel participation on Saturday.
But Sinner’s agenda is clear: his goal remains Roland-Garros, the second Grand Slam tournament of the season at the end of the month. There he could replace Novak Djokovic at the top of the world rankings and write the next chapter of his growing legend. The Sinner mania in Italy would then undoubtedly reach the next level.
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