Sinner, things didn’t turn out at all as we thought: he spilled the beans and everyone was stunned.
He thought he was now a goner. And we, to be honest, thought so too, if only for a split second. A champion who is worthy of the name, however, never gives up, so much so that it was his incredible resilience, at one point, that made the difference. That allowed him to rewrite the ending of a match that seemed lost.
How things went in Melbourne at the recent Australian Open final, we all remember. Jannik Sinner was down two sets and seemed unable to hold on to his opponent Daniil Medvedev. The Russian, in fact, led the game remarkably well, until his rival from Alto Adige, partly out of pride and partly because he was itching to win his first Slam, got up and started fighting for real. The rest is history, in the true sense of the word. Because the Azure, with that victory, a history has been written. His own, which becomes more and more incredible page after page.
But have you ever wondered, in fact, how the Moscow native reacted to that unexpected defeat and the resounding comeback by the new world number 3? Have you ever made any assumptions about his mood in the days immediately following the Slam?
Sinner, here’s how things really went down
We all, most likely, assumed that the Russian was just sitting in a room licking his wounds and brooding over his mistakes. But we were wrong. We were very wrong. No trauma followed that, albeit very painful, defeat.
“Did I struggle to overcome the disappointment of Melbourne? If I have to be honest, getting over it was pretty easy,” he said in a recent interview. “As I said after the match, I had the impression that it would be easy to do that because I played a great tournament and a good final with Jannik. In the knowledge that he had given his best, rightly so, he willingly accepted what happened in kangaroo land.
It was much more traumatic, he later admitted, to digest the 2022 defeat, again in Melbourne in the final, suffered at the hands of Rafael Nadal. “Even mentally and environmentally,” he explained, “I felt like I was really close to winning. Not that I was then concretely on the court, but in my head I was.” And who would have thought, in all honesty, that Meddy was so wise?