Jannik Sinner’s return to tennis shifts from triumph to toughness at the Italian Open

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ROME — The chants and the roars started hours before Jannik Sinner took the court, and they came from a surprising place.

Inside the Stadio Olimpico, a few courts north of the main tennis arena at the Foro Italico, supporters of rival Serie A soccer clubs Lazio and Juventus joined together to sing the chant that has become a staple in men’s tennis. Judging by the world No. 1’s performance in his first two comeback matches from a three-month doping suspension, it will be so for much longer.

“Olé, olé olé olé, Sinner, Sinner,” came the cry.

When the time came, Sinner came out clad in all black and started the night by smacking an inside-in forehand to win the first point against Mariano Navone of Argentina. Sinner, the former ski master, mostly ran downhill from there in beating Navone 6-3, 6-4.

This was what the thousands of fans who gathered under and on the bridge across the complex had waited a quarter of the year for. This was what the 10,000 lucky souls with tickets, many of them wearing fluorescent orange to honor their red-headed hero’s mane, were ready to build with their Mexican waves and screams.

And this was what Navone, the world No. 99 but a game competitor on red clay, was powerless to fend off.

“I was waiting for this moment for a long time,” Sinner said after it was over.

On a perfect, clear night in the Italian capital, when the leaves of Rome’s graceful umbrella pine trees that hug the rim of the Campo Centrale barely moved, Sinner showed that he could be as good as he needed to be.

Not perfect. Not clinical. There was an awkward overhead in the third game that Sinner couldn’t meet square on. He nearly cracked it into the net from five feet away, but the ball ticked over on the way to Sinner’s winning the point. The Italian let out a rare mid-match grin. His coaches, Simone Vagnozzi and Darren Cahill, laughed in his box.

Sinner missed. He missed long and wide off both the forehand and backhand wing, sometimes with wide swathes of open court to aim for. He missed the outsides of lines when he didn’t need to go for them. He jumped into forehands and sent balls into the alleys when keeping his feet on the ground would have been just fine.

But then the ball would shoot off his strings, coming high and hard and spinning over the net with its eyes on a corner before landing on Navone’s racket like a four-pound rock. Or Sinner would deliver one of those sideways sliding drop shots. Navone could see him starting to cut the ball long before his strings touched the yellow fuzz. The Argentine still couldn’t do anything about it unless Sinner missed them, which of course he did on occasion.

But so does that backhand from off the court, firing over the net post and slamming down onto a postage stamp target. One of those and another just like it wore Navone down in the game that gave Sinner what looked to be a decisive second set break and a 4-3 lead.

One of the sport’s great front-runners, Sinner figured to end all of this quickly. But then the mothballs showed. It’s nearly impossible to simulate the tension of actual competition in practice. Sinner showed he hadn’t dealt with it in a while and a flurry of errors gave Navone the break back.

Still, Sinner pushed in and got another break in the next game. On the final point, he smacked a serve down the T, pulled the extra ball from his pocket and smacked that into the second deck. A release.

To no one’s surprise, this was a different Sinner than the one who eased and stumbled his way through practice matches against Lorenzo Sonego and Casper Ruud before the tournament began. It was far different from the one that Jack Draper described practicing with in the south of France early last month, a guy playing a far less intense brand of tennis than the three-time Grand Slam champion who had made him puke in their 2024 U.S. Open semifinal.

“He was very relaxed the first day,” Draper told a few reporters Friday night. “I was more on top of him when we played points. That was his first points back, but then, he started to play really well in the days after that and quickly adapted.

“I don’t know what to expect from him this week — knowing him, he’ll probably come out and play incredibly well.”

Whatever version of himself he is ready for Rome to see, Sinner will have to be more loose and languid than he has been to date.

He got a break Saturday when the dangerous Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, one of the better players on tour this season, took an early exit, with Jesper de Jong beating him badly, 6-0, 6-2. De Jong, the world No. 93, didn’t figure to be able to give Sinner much resistance. He did in the opening set, stealing back two breaks of serve that he had lost from a position where so many of Sinner’s opponents have crumbled in the past. But the world No. 1 nicked the decisive break at 4-4 and from then on the running was easy, especially after de Jong fell heavily midway through the second set.

Now the challenges grow stiffer. Francisco Cerundolo and Casper Ruud, two top-notch clay-court players who thrive on discomfiting an opponent not quite in their rhythm, are in his quarter. He faces Cerundolo first and he could face them back to back should he come through that test.

Ruud, coming off the title in Madrid, looks like he might be returning to the clay-court form that carried him to two French Open finals and the doorstep of a third, had a parasite not overturned his stomach midway through his semifinal against Alexander Zverev last year.

Sinner said as much after beating Navone, explaining how different the emotions are under the lights on a center court in front of 10,000 mad fans than they are at a local club in the south of France.

“The whole match, even when it seems quite comfortable, it’s a roller coaster,” he said. “Especially inside, we feel that.”

The mere act of serving got his nerves going. He said it was difficult to move properly early on.

“I’m very competitive, so I love the official match,” he said. “That’s what I was looking for, no? Today I felt quite good on court. I’m happy about that. We are aiming for small improvements, which are the small details that can make the difference.”

After his match against de Jong, Sinner dived further into the challenges of coming back to competition after time away.

“I started off very well today, then I had a drop, which usually is one and a half games,” he said in a news conference.

“Today was three games, three and a half games. But it’s normal. It’s the second match I play in three and a half months. It’s a long time.”

Sinner is not an outwardly emotional person or player. A fist pump and the occasional finger to the ear after a nifty shot is about all fans get from him. But he said he has been nothing less than overwhelmed by the reception he has received in Rome.

Italian tennis fans have been thrilled by Jannik Sinner’s return. (Pierro Cruciatti / AFP via Getty Images)

He has become what the Italians refer to as “fuoriclasse,” which roughly translates as out of this world, or world-class. He is one of the “predestinato,” predestined, as it were, for greatness. He has become the sporting avatar of a country searching for one after the decline in global relevance of its international soccer team. While Inter has reached the Champions League final, Europe’s elite club tournament, the Juventus and Lazio fans singing Sinner’s song were waiting to watch two clubs who once ruled the country and the continent.

“That means much more than any result,” he said of how the fans received him. “It has been an amazing feeling to come here starting from the first practices with other players.

He pointed out that he is not alone, name-checking his Davis Cup champion teammates, Lorenzo Musetti and Matteo Berrettini.

“There are so many other Italians playing here, which makes the whole package even bigger,” he said. “It’s amazing, the Italian tennis, what we have right now.”

And the leader of it all is officially back.

(Top photo: Marco Bertorello / AFP via Getty Images)

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