The Rise and Rise of Jannik Sinner

The story of how Jannik Sinner, a generational talent, vaulted from being a virtually unknown teen tennis prodigy to a global superstar goes like this: In 2018, at the age of sixteen, the Italian went pro. A year later, while still ranked a lowly 546th in the world, he entered a tournament in Bergamo, Italy, as a wild card—and won the whole thing. Not long after, he competed at the Next Gen ATP Finals against the best players twenty-one years old and under. He won that tournament, too, and burst into the top hundred. Suddenly, everyone in tennis was paying close attention to Sinner. Just a few years later, in 2023, he carried Italy to its first Davis Cup victory since 1976 and became a national hero.