Given Jannik Sinner wilted in the scorching Paris heat on his last competitive outing and arrives at Wimbledon with question marks over his staying power in the sun, the setting in which we find the reigning champion seems perfect.
For his first public outing since his Roland Garros woe, we’re perched under a tree for much-needed shade, with the world No 1 sitting across a plastic table. It is probably the only corner of the elite Hurlingham Club that is not top of the range.
Amid the sound of peacocks rudely interrupting with their piercing calls and staff offering well-to-do members drinks and sun-cream, Sinner fights away a few beads of sweat as he sits, despite having only just showered.
Welcome to London in the hottest week of the year: a nightmare for most but an apt place to warm up for a man who objectively does not deal well with heat.
Arriving 10 days before Wimbledon, think of it as a warm-weather camp akin to England’s pre-World Cup Florida trip.
With two-time winner and fan-favourite Carlos Alcaraz not present at this year’s Championships due to injury, and a veteran Novak Djokovic now 39 and past his best (though never write him off), the weather is Sinner’s biggest rival when he returns to SW19 to defend his crown.
The weather is Jannik Sinner’s biggest rival to defend his Wimbledon crown
SInner was two sets and 5-1 up against then world No 56 Juan Manuel Cerundolo. A crazy collapse saw him lose 18 of the following 20 games and crash out of French Open last month
All else being equal, Sinner is overwhelmingly fancied. When Alexander Zverev finally won a Grand Slam in Paris last month, he was the first person not named Sinner or Alcaraz to win a major since Djokovic at the US Open in autumn 2023. A duopoly akin to Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
So how is Sinner coping with the heat? After Paris, he took a week off and tried to mentally reset, though the Italian struggled to do so due to the fact that the tournament was still going on.
He then sat down with his team wanting to get to the bottom of what was wrong with him at the French Open. He visited medical facilities in Turin and Milan for comprehensive cardiovascular, metabolic and exhaustion-related tests.
In warm-ups in London last week, he was wearing an ice vest — the opposite of a heated gilet — that has been used by some football teams in the sweaty climes of North America this month.
It must not be understated just how much Sinner wilted in the heat on Court Philippe Chatrier last month: he was two sets and 5-1 up against then world No 56 Juan Manuel Cerundolo. A crazy collapse saw him lose 18 of the following 20 games and crash out.
The event was not a one-off. He had severe cramps at the Australian Open in January. His match with American Eliot Spizzirri was halted due to heat rules, with him a break of serve down. He later came back to win.
Another time, he retired against Tallon Griekspoor, of the Netherlands, due to full-body cramps in humid Shanghai last autumn.
‘We did some testing, we tried to understand what happened, we came to a conclusion which is very good,’ he said this week. ‘So we worked very much, we changed the work a little bit as well, trying to see how my body reacts in different conditions.’
He now reckons the chances of a repeat of the heat-related problems at the last two majors are ‘as low as possible’ and that he has ‘one of the best preparations I’ve had in a long time before a Grand Slam’.
In warm-ups last week Sinner was wearing an ice vest — the opposite of a heated gilet — that has been used by some football teams at the World Cup including Spain (pictured: Lamine Yamal)
So that’s that then, he hopes. Onwards and upwards to a tournament where he is under pressure to triumph. With his great rival Alcaraz absent, Sinner is the odds-on favourite to retain his crown. If he does, he will join an illustrious list of back-to-back winners including Alcaraz,
Djokovic, Roger Federer, Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, John Newcombe and Rod Laver.
Most of those gentlemen are household names. Sinner, it is perhaps fair to say, is not, despite being world No 1 and a four-time Grand Slam winner. Not yet anyway.
Yes, his orange hair and gangly frame are instantly recognisable among sports aficionados — but do the general public know a great deal about the Italian 24-year-old?
To recap his journey, then, Sinner was born in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains and his first love was skiing on the Alpine slopes around his hometown of Sexten, South Tyrol, a German-speaking town close to Italy’s Austrian border.
A dome over the sports centre proudly displays the words ‘where champions are born’, visible from the nearby ski lifts and cable cars, and it is fitting — though he was more likely to be a slalom world champion than tennis.
In his early teens, Sinner — whose father, Hanspeter, was a chef at a ski lodge and his mother, Siglinde, a waitress — made the decision to move to Piatti Tennis Centre which sits at the instep of the ‘boot’ on the map of Italy, an eight-hour drive with good traffic.
There was no snow, skiing and the dialect was worlds away, though a Croatian family — who he is still in touch with — housed him. ‘I wish that everyone could have my parents because they always let me choose whatever I wanted to,’ he later recalled.
His reason for choosing tennis over skiing? The racquet sport is much more forgiving in terms of mistakes, of which he made many in his early years.
At one stage in Paris Sinner had to use a fan and cold towel to try to save himself from the heat
Federer famously revealed he lost 46 per cent of points he played during his career, but won 80 per cent of his matches.
Unlike skiing, where one mistake could spell the end of your day, tennis allowed him to learn from mistakes and problem-solve on the job. The next big decision he made was to not compete in the junior Grand Slams but on the ITF Futures circuit against taller and stronger players.
In his first months, he was bullied on the court. But slowly he got better and won a main-draw match for the first time in 2018.
The next year, he got his first ATP Tour win, which bagged him his first four-figure pay-check. Kerching. For comparison, winning the first round at Wimbledon is worth £80,000 and the whole tournament £3.6million.
He started to climb the ladder that year and met a certain Alcaraz for the first time in Alicante.
By the end of 2019, he was ranked world No 78 and people were taking note after he gave Stan Wawrinka a tough contest at the US Open.
The following year saw the Covid pandemic stall his rise but he still beat Zverev in Paris and battled Rafa Nadal in the quarter-final.
He ended 2021 as world No 9 and was clearly a top player — but had several things to work on to take the steps that prevent many from breaking into the very elite group.
In 2022, he finally split with Riccardo Piatti, his first coach who set him on the path to stardom.
Darren Cahill, once in the box of Andre Agassi, Simona Halep and Lleyton Hewitt, took the reins alongside Italian Simone Vagnozzi.
Sinner improved physically and mentally, with self-belief, strength, resistance and his game-variety improving. Soon, he reached the Wimbledon semi-finals in 2023 and won two Slams in 2024, in Australia and New York.
Last year, he returned for his crown in Melbourne, conquered the All England Club and was a finalist in the other two majors.
But 2025 was also a memorable year for a different reason. From February to May, Sinner was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for testing positive for clostebol, an anabolic steroid derived from testosterone and used in some treatments for skin healing and tissue repair.
Sinner told the physio he felt dizzy and said ‘I feel like I’m going to throw up’
Sinner’s argument, accepted by the International Tennis Integrity Agency, was that it entered his system via a massage.
WADA said he should take some responsibility and appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), before agreeing to a three-month ban.
‘WADA accepts that Mr Sinner did not intend to cheat and that his exposure to clostebol did not provide any performance-enhancing benefit and took place without his knowledge as the result of negligence of members of his entourage,’ the body said.
The ban was widely criticised as ‘convenient’, given the timing meant he missed no Grand Slams.
‘No titles lost, no prize money lost, guilty or not, sad day for tennis,’ said the outspoken Nick Kyrgios.
British great Tim Henman said it was ‘too convenient’ and current player Liam Broady said: ‘I didn’t realise you could reach a settlement regarding a doping ban … interesting. Back in time for the French Open I guess?’
All that is behind him now but the Italian still has his critics, not least Agassi, who said of his loss in Paris: ‘Sinner going out was huge, and I don’t know if you called him out on that enough.
‘I had a body clock of about four hours when I played, and if you gave me hot conditions, it dropped to like, three-45, three-50, it didn’t change a lot.
‘But to go from him playing five and a half hours last year in the finals and then having the heat tap him in an hour 45… there’s a difference between being fit and being prepared.
‘I have to point at a flaw in that kind of preparation, because there’s something you can do about that.
‘It’s not that that dude doesn’t work hard, that he’s not fit. We all thought we’d see him here, maybe not even losing a set.’
Many think the same about Wimbledon this week, where he will open the tournament on Centre Court today as defending champion against Miomir Kecmanovic, with Djokovic potentially in the semi-final. He is heavily backed but the heat is on.
