For five hours and 29 minutes on Sunday, tennis fans around the world were treated to one of the most absurd spectacles the sport has ever seen.
In the longest French Open final – and the second longest grand slam final – in history, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner showed once again that tennis’ future is in safe hands.
With Novak Djokovic in the twilight of his career and Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal already hanging up their rackets, it would be entirely natural for fans to worry about the considerable void the three greatest players of all time will leave behind them.
But as Alcaraz and Sinner crushed groundstrokes at each other on the iconic red clay of Roland Garros, displayed pinpoint precision with deft drop shots and volleys, and chased down each shot with a fierce determination, nobody was thinking about the Big Three and whether their sizeable shoes still needed filling.
Instead, it was one of those special sporting moments in which everyone watching knew they were witnessing history.
That Alcaraz ended up the victor – improbably coming back from two sets down for the first time and saving three championship points to eventually win 4-6, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(3), 7-6(2) – was largely immaterial to the final spectacle; Sinner winning that final-set championship tiebreak wouldn’t have made the match any less remarkable.
Even before Sunday’s epic final, John McEnroe was so impressed with what he had seen from the pair in Paris that he made the case, though admitted it sounded “semi crazy to say,” that either Alcaraz or Sinner would beat the Big Three at their peak.
“You took a look at them bringing their A-game right now – I’m saying Sinner and Alcaraz against Rafael Nadal on clay, you know, he won this 14 times – you would make a serious argument with both guys that they would be favored to beat Nadal, at his best,” he told TNT Sports.
“Now, do I think they’re going to reach, 20, 24 titles either one of them? No. Because I think that plateau is so hard it’s almost impossible – there’s more depth in the game, bigger hitters, and more things happen.
“But these two guys right now, it’s like when you watch the NBA and you say nobody could be better than Michael Jordan. The tennis level right now is higher than I’ve ever seen.”
Boris Becker, another former world No. 1, said the current level of tennis shown by Alcaraz and Sinner is “exactly the level” the Big Three played at.
There is no doubt that an intense rivalry can elevate and even transcend a sport, and tennis has been blessed with no shortage of great rivalries over the past two decades.
The drama and pageantry of the 2008 Wimbledon final between Nadal and Federer and the 2012 Australian Open final between Nadal and Djokovic elevated them both beyond the status of a mere tennis final. They are now singular events that beg the question: “Where were you when…?”
We could now be seeing the blossoming of tennis’ next great rivalry, with the head-to-head between Alcaraz and Sinner now at an intriguing crossroads.
Alcaraz leads 8-4 but, crucially, has now won five matches in a row against Sinner and currently appears to have the world No. 1’s number. The Italian is 111-10 since the 2023 Beijing Open, but half of the losses are to the man from Murcia, including all of Sinner’s three losses in his last 50 matches.
But a large part of the fascination in watching two rivals battle it out for the duration of their careers comes from the twists and turns, as both parties figure out weaknesses and try to gain the upper hand.
For example, between March 2013 and January 2014, Nadal beat Federer five times in a row, before the Swiss turned the tide to win the next six matches between the two giants from November 2015 to March 2019.
The future of tennis’ newest rivalry will be the subject of much debate between now and the start of Wimbledon at the end of the month, but it seems a fairly safe bet that Alcaraz and Sinner – who have now won the last six grand slams between them – will be battling it out at the top for a long time to come.
Alcaraz found it hard to explain what it was like playing in a match of that standard, describing it as “amazing.”
“To put it into words is really difficult,” he told Eurosport’s Lesly Boitrelle and Àlex Corretja. “Being two sets to love down against the No. 1 in the world, the level Jannik was playing at was unbelievable.
“It’s my first time coming back from two sets to love down. Honestly, I just poured my heart into it, I just tried to keep going, not think about the result and just play my best tennis in the third and fourth, and then the fifth.
“The fifth set was just not giving up, it was just fighting and thinking point after point, and at the end of the fifth I was just playing with heart. Honestly, I don’t know what I did to win this match. I’m really, really happy and proud with how I dealt with everything today.”
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