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On a blazingly sunny morning in March, the 22-year-old Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner could be found on the sprawling grounds of a ranch-style home he’d rented in the Coachella Valley. Sinner was there for the annual tournament at Indian Wells, where he was looking to extend a months-long blitz of a winning streak. I was there to ask Sinner about this streak, which culminated in his first Grand Slam title, at the Australian Open in January. His remarkable run, which now includes a commanding win at the Miami Open last week, has propelled him to world No. 2 and made him the talk of Italy, a soccer-obsessed country where tennis doesn’t normally make the front page.
But when you get in a room with Jannik Sinner, it is easy to be driven to distraction by something else entirely: His hair. It's red, and it’s spectacular. It tumbles forth in a mop of cherubic curls. It’s one reason he is known as the Fox, a nickname he picked up in grade school. And it’s partly why his notorious superfans, the Carota Boys, show up to his tournaments dressed in carrot costumes. As we sat talking in a cabana that served as his dressing room for Vogue’s photo shoot, a stylist scrunched Sinner’s curls into bigger, bouncier heights. When I asked Sinner how he manages to stuff his curls into the snug-fitting hats he wears during matches, he answered the question with no hesitation, as though he’d been expecting it. “This is a talent,” he said.
Sinner demonstrated the move in a two-part motion. “You put the hairs back like this,” he said, pulling his curls straight back and holding them down. “And you put the hat like this,” he said, slipping a white cap over his head, back to front. He showed me the maneuver again, this time at a faster clip. “But the thing is, this one usually stays out,” he said, pulling at errant tufts that were peeking out from under the sides of his hat. At a certain point, Sinner explained, the curls begin to exert so much pressure on the cap that the cap starts to slide around on his head, and then it’s time for a haircut. “When the hat is moving, that’s when I know I have to go to the hairdresser.”
Sinner is an athlete of multiple talents. Growing up in the small mountain town of Sesto, in the Dolomites near the Austrian border, he was an accomplished ski racer—he won a national championship in giant slalom at age eight and placed second at age twelve. (Sesto is in South Tyrol, a largely German-speaking region, and German is Sinner’s first language.) In the warm months he played soccer and tennis, and when he was around fourteen, the former Italian tennis pro Alex Vittur, who is now Sinner’s manager, made him an offer: Move to Bordighera, on the Italian Riviera, and train full-time at Riccardo Piatti’s tennis academy.
Sinner’s rankings in skiing had started to slip. “I was winning a lot when I was young in skiing, and in tennis I never won,” he told me. “And then slowly I started to lose in skiing, because physically I was not ready to compete. I was always quite skinny and everything.” Compared to the split-second margins of ski-racing, Sinner explained, tennis felt more forgiving. “The reason why I chose tennis was, in tennis you can make mistakes. You can lose points but you can still win the match. In skiing, if you make one mistake, one big mistake, you cannot win.”
Sinner made the move, leaving behind his dad, Johann, who worked as a cook at a local ski lodge; his mom, Siglinde, then a waitress at the same restaurant; and his older brother, Marc. In Bordighera, Sinner lived with the young family of a Croatian coach who worked at the academy, Luka Cvjetkovic. “They had two kids, one dog. I came into this family and it was a nice feeling. Obviously I missed my parents and all my friends, and sometimes the other sports, but it was a good experience for me. So I just tried to keep going. From one day to another I was changing my life.”
Sinner seems so even-tempered, on court and in conversation, it’s hard to imagine he harbors any sort of cutthroat edge, but it’s clear he was precociously competitive from a young age. Two years after he enrolled in Piatti’s academy, and already bored with junior events, Sinner went pro. The 2019 season was “a changer,” as he put it. He won a tournament in Bergamo after entering on a wildcard, and, nine months later, the Next Gen ATP Finals. In early 2022, not long after he broke into the top 10, Sinner overhauled his coaching team, parting ways with Piatti and hiring Simone Vagnozzi and Darren Cahill. “I wanted to throw myself into the fire,” he has said of that decision. “I wanted to try a different method.”
Vagnozzi told me that when they started working together, Sinner was already a singular player with unusually formidable ground strokes—early articles often note the menacing sound of his shots—and an indefatigable will to win. “He was always a really good fighter on the court,” Vagnozzi said by phone from Milan. “He never loses belief.” There were weak sides to his game, though. “Really strong with his forehand and backhand, but it was not various. It was monotone.” Among the things they set out to improve: “Drop shots, coming to the net more, working on his serve, and especially to understand the game tactically, no?”
Sinner also hired a new fitness coach, Umberto Ferrara, around the same time. Reached in Bologna, Ferrara said that one of their first orders of business was “to grow his body mass.” (Sinner is so lanky that when you watch him practice up close, as I did one afternoon at Indian Wells, it is difficult to reconcile the thunderous pop of his shots with the Gumby-like beanpole producing the sound.) Sinner trains with Ferrara two and a half hours a day when he is not competing, and that’s on top of the three hours he spends practicing on court. At one point when I was with Sinner, he said of Ferrara, unconvincingly with a smile: “I hate him.” When I relayed this to Ferrara, he laughed. “I know, I know,” Ferrara said. “But he is a very smart guy. I don’t know in English but in Italian we say ‘big problem but is necessary.’ Un male necessario.” (A necessary evil.)
If you ask Sinner what led to his recent run of uninterrupted victories, certain key losses loom larger than the wins. Two in particular left scars. One was at the U.S. Open in 2022, where he lost to Carlos Alcaraz in the quarterfinals after an epic battle that lasted until 2:50 a.m., the latest finish in the tournament’s history. The other was at the 2023 U.S. Open. He lost, painfully, to Alexander Zverev in the fourth round. “Tough moment for me mentally, because I felt like I was getting closer,” Sinner said. “From that moment, I started to really work on myself.” What exactly did he work on? “The mental part,” he said. “It’s easy to say, ‘He is strong mentally.’ But in my mind I was like, ‘I am strong mentally but I think I have to improve.’ And so I started to accept my mistakes. And trying really to work on these small little things, which at some point can make the difference.”
Whatever he did, Sinner’s been on a tear ever since. He won 20 of his last 22 matches of the 2023 season, including titles in Beijing and Vienna. At the ATP Finals in Turin, he beat the unbeatable Novak Djokovic for the first time. (Sinner ultimately lost to Djokovic in the last round. It was the most-watched tennis match of all time on Italian television.) His streak officially began in late November at the Davis Cup. He beat Djokovic a second time and led Italy to its first Davis Cup title since 1976. It continued through the Australian Open—he beat Djokovic again in the semis, and dug himself out of a hole to defeat Daniil Medvedev in the final—and the Rotterdam Open. (By the time Alcaraz ended Sinner’s run, in the semis at Indian Wells, it was the longest winning streak of any Italian player in the Open Era.)
“I lived this whole trip in Australia with very calmness,” Sinner told me. Even in his match against Djokovic? “It’s a different match than most of the matches,” he said. “Because you play against one who never lost a semifinal there. You’re playing against one who won 24 Grand Slams. So in your mind, you have to do the right thing. Tactically, you have to be perfect. Mentally also, because he’s never gonna drop down. I was just trying to play point after point with the right mentality. That’s the only thing I can control.”
In his first major final, against Medvedev in Melbourne, Sinner had to fight his way back from two sets down. He knew Medvedev had played more hours on the court than he had in the lead-up, so he tried to bide his time, to tire Medvedev out. “At some point my goal was to keep him on court as long as possible,” Sinner said. “Hopefully he’s going to drop a little bit. And that’s the moment where I have to push, no? I was waiting for my opportunities. And I was waiting and waiting. It never arrived and then it was getting closer.”
Patience and resilience seem to be renewable resources for Sinner, and in the third set, he turned the match around in classic Sinner fashion. As a visibly fatigued Medvedev started to make unforced errors, Sinner appeared to relax and take control. “I said, ‘OK, now I feel confident again,’” he recalled. “And the crowd was getting a little bit to my side.” He won the third set, then the fourth. “Grand Slam final, fifth set, tough situation to be in,” he went on. “But also that’s what I practiced for in my mind. Physically I’m ready. I just have to be focused, no? And I started to hit the ball really well.”
On stage during the trophy ceremony, Sinner’s stoic realism, unorthodox English and deadpan delivery combined to comic effect. “I’m so glad to have you there,” he told his team. “Supporting me, understanding me, which, sometimes it’s not easy, because I’m still a little bit young sometimes? But it is what it is.” At a press conference later, a reporter asked Sinner if he felt pressure to live up to other people’s expectations, and he answered in his usual dispassionate tone: “I like to dance in the pressure storm.”
As Sinner sees it, one must make peace with the unrelenting pressure of competitive tennis. “This pressure, you have to take it in a positive way,” he told me. “You have to be kind with the pressure. You have to make friendship. If you hate this pressure, it’s the wrong sport for you, no?” It helps that in tennis there is no time to dwell on the losses or the wins, he added. “The really good and positive thing of tennis is, you have this momentum. The momentum can be positive, happy. And can be negative when you lose. But you live in a momentum. In my mind, everything goes quite fast.”
Sinner has a house in Monte Carlo, as well as an Audi RS6 (he loves cars), but he is rarely there. The tennis schedule doesn’t allow for regular trips home. He does make a point to go to Sesto every Christmas, so he can ski with his friends and eat his favorite unhealthy lunch. (Fried chicken and vanilla ice cream with berries for dessert.) His parents still live in Sesto—they run a guesthouse called Haus Sinner—as does his brother, Marc, with whom he is close. (Sinner declined to answer questions about his love life, but according to the tennis press, he is in a long-term relationship with an Italian model named Maria Braccini.)
When Sinner went back to Italy for the first time after the Davis Cup, he was greeted like a war hero. “There was a lot of love,” he told me. The love snowballed after the Australian Open. On a trip to Rome in February, Sinner was received at the Chigi Palace by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who played video of match point for him on a large screen in her office. As if to drive home that tennis is a blood sport, Sinner took his trophy to the Colosseum and posed for photos on the floor of the amphitheater, foisting the cup in the air. Later, he and his Davis Cup teammates were honored by Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, at the Quirinal Palace. Pope Francis congratulated all of Italy for Sinner’s win.
“You could feel that it was something big,” Sinner said. “I take it very, I won’t say normal, because it’s a situation I’ve never imagined to be in, but to see people happy, that makes me happy.” Even better than the adulation in his view is the fact that, owing to his feats and that of other Italian players in recent years—Francesca Schiavone, Flavia Pennetta, Fabio Fognini, Matteo Berrettini—more Italians are picking up tennis rackets. “In Italy we are a great country of sport, and now people they start to play a little bit more tennis.”
In the California desert, Sinner was back in the momentum. Asked about his goals for the year, he said, “Trying to be as competitive as possible in all Grand Slams, but mostly the Olympics.” (He did not mention the Miami Open, but after trouncing Grigor Dimitrov in straight sets in the final there, he told me in an email: “I missed out on this trophy a few years back against my good friend Hubi [Poland’s Hubert Hurkacz] in the final and then against Medvedev last year, so I have been close yet never managed to win it, until now. It’s an awesome feeling.”) A short-term objective was to put on even more weight. “We try obviously to get stronger, no? But not, like, big. Because I think my strength is the flexibility I have in my shots.” Perhaps with this in mind, Sinner’s father, Johann, was cooking lunch in the kitchen. Sinner also had a high school friend named Alex staying with him: “He knows me from when I was Jannik before all this, so I’m sure that he’s my best friend because of how I am, and not all the rest.”
I left Sinner alone to change out of his tennis clothes. Outside, members of his coaching team were lounging around a turquoise lap pool, behind which rose the jagged peaks of the Santa Rosa Mountains—a cinematic backdrop so severe it almost looked fake. Sinner emerged wearing jeans and a bomber jacket by Gucci, one of his many sponsors. As he made his way across the lawn to the camera crew, he spotted Ferrara sun-bathing at the far end of the pool. Sinner walked over to a soccer ball on the grass and casually launched a perfect goal kick in the direction of Ferrara’s chaise. The ball soared across the lawn, cleared the pool and seemed to curve mid-air before landing right in front of Ferrara, who caught it in his hands.
In this story: groomer; Elayna Bachman; manicurist: Pilar Lafargue; tailor: Caroline Trimble