Sinner beats Medvedev to win the Australian Open and claim the first Grand Slam title

They are in a hurry, this younger crop of tennis stars, with no interest in waiting their turn to take over their sport, or respecting their elders.

On a warm Sunday evening at Rod Laver Arena, Jannik Sinner, the 22-year-old fast-rising star from Italy, became the latest member of the 'next generation' to win a Grand Slam title.

He recovered from two sets down to beat Daniil Medvedev 3-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 to win the Australian Open title in his first time in one of the ultimate showdowns of the game. In doing so, he became only the second player under the age of 23 in the Open Era to win a Grand Slam final from two sets behind, after Bjorn Borg (Roland-Garros, 1974). He is only the eighth person to do it at all.

“It's the happy Slam,” Sinner said, using the nickname Roger Federer gave to the Australian Open when he held the big silver trophy. His thoughts then turned to the chef and restaurant worker in the mountainous region of northeastern Italy who had raised him – the ones who, he said, gave him the opportunity to choose his sport and follow his dream. “Where my parents are, it's -20 degrees in the morning!”

Better, he said, to run around the tennis courts during the Australian summer – and become the youngest man to win the Australian Open since Djokovic in 2008.

In reaching the final, Medvedev didn't have much to pin his hopes on against Sinner, who has long been praised for his greatness and whose speed and power seemed to come together at just the right time. Medvedev had lost his past three matches against Sinner. He had spent about 20 hours on the court, including two five-set marathons, one of which ended at 3:40 in the morning the first week. Sinner had endured his draws, including a stunning defeat of 10-time champion Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals.

But Medvedev walked onto the field with one glaring advantage. He has been on this stage before. This was his third Australian Open final and his sixth time playing for a Grand Slam title. It was Sinner's first and he played the first two sets like this: tight in his body language, tentative in his movements, tentative in his shots, a shadow of the player he had been for the past two weeks.

Sinner tried to stay in the match in the third set and took advantage of a tiring Medvedev to reduce his deficit as Rod Laver Arena went live for the first time all evening – the screaming Italians in the crowd finally had something to shout about . Suddenly, Medvedev looked like he had visions of the 2022 final as he coughed up a two-set lead against that irresistible tennis force, a surging Rafael Nadal.

The Sinner wave on Sunday evening was something different.

---

And stay informed about our latest pieces

---

First, he stopped making mistakes on basic shots, especially his backhand, which Medvedev started testing in the first game and never stopped. He then began working his way to points on Medvedev's serve, forcing Medvedev to dip further into his energy reserves, which were initially low after two weeks of marathon matches.

And then, with the score even for the first time in nearly three hours, Sinner finally began firing the lasers from the baseline that had taken out his six previous opponents, including perhaps the greatest of all time.

The decisive break came in the sixth game of the fifth set in a pattern that had become all too familiar to Medvedev over the past hour. Sinner pounced on his softening second serve to push him back into the court and two shots later he fired a forehand up the court that left Medvedev unable to do anything but watch him zoom past.

Three matches later, Sinner became the first Italian man to win the Australian Open in the modern era of tennis. He finished the match with a final forehand shot down the line and fell to his back as he watched it shoot through the back of the court. Medvedev became the first man to twice lose a two-set lead in a Grand Slam final.

“You fought until the end, you managed to raise your level,” Medvedev told Sinner when it was over and he held the second trophy for the third time. “It always hurts to lose in the final, but probably losing in the final is better than before. I am proud of myself and I will try harder next time.”

For the better part of the past two years, Carlos Alcaraz, the 20-year-old Spanish sensation, has dominated the buzz of men's tennis as he lived up to the hype of being the sport's next big thing. But as Alcaraz sprinted to the top of the game and in 2022 became the youngest man to become world No. 1 since the inception of the modern rankings system, Sinner preached the value of patience and process.

His time would come, he promised, but he was different from Alcaraz, someone who had to improve step by step and methodically move on to the deeper sides of tournaments and learn to play on the biggest stages in the sport. Everyone was in a hurry to have him and Alcaraz face off and start a new rivalry in the spirit of Federer-Nadal or Nadal-Djokovic.

Everything in due time, he said. That time may well have come Sunday night, in part because, as he watched the legends of the sport to learn how they practiced and prepared, he also came to believe from Alcaraz that he, too, could beat the best players if Well , even though he was young.

Very little in sports happens by accident, and certainly not in the creation of a Grand Slam champion. Tennis is an individual sport, but countries sometimes produce waves of top players. A decade ago, Spain was tennis king, winning the Davis Cup, the sport's biggest national competition, four times in eight years, with Nadal leading the way.

Italian tennis was a mess, without many top players and little talent in the pipeline. Around that time, the country's tennis federation developed a plan to become a destination for more junior and lower professional tournaments. This allowed players like Sinner, Lorenzo Musetti, Matteo Arnaldi and others the federation supported to gain experience in high-level competitions without having to bear the costs of international travel.

“It's amazing how much support I've gotten,” Sinner said.

Still, there is no set formula for creating a Grand Slam champion, especially if he makes a different sound when he hits a tennis ball with his racket, a kind of bang that lets the opponent know the ball is coming towards him quickly .

There is a very basic tennis strategy that anyone who has played or watched the sport even a few times will be familiar with. It basically involves standing on the baseline and hitting the ball at an opponent's backhand again and again until you can prove that the backhand is strong enough to withstand the pressure. At that stage it can start demanding punishment because the player knows what is going to happen.

That's Plan A. It often doesn't work very well in Grand Slam finals, because the best players in the world can handle just about any shot if they know what's coming, even if their backhand isn't that great.

In Medvedev's case, it worked for a long time, with Sinner unable to cope with the stress of the rallies and the moment. But Sinner came alive when Medvedev served for the second set at 5-1. Sinner broke it, and almost broke it again, at 5-3, and went into the third set convinced he had a chance.

As Sinner made his comeback, Darren Cahill, one of Sinner's coaches, stood in his box and shouted “He's tired”, reminding Sinner to have the mentality of his champion.

“Once it gets to a fourth and fifth set, it's about what's inside you,” Cahill said.

Medvedev still had something left, but it was moving quickly, and he was desperate to avoid his fourth five-set match of a tournament when he spent more time on the court than almost any other in Grand Slam history, in the words of Cahill, 'went to hell'. and back” to come within two points of serving for the title.

That was as close as he could get. There was another of the game's young players who demanded he give way.

“You live with these kinds of movements,” Sinner said. “You don't even realize how fast you're moving.”

(Top photo: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)