The childhood of Jannik Sinner is now known to many: captain of the Sesto football team, talented in both skiing and tennis, choosing to invest in the latter sport before becoming great and coming close to being number one seeding (reachable after Roland Garros Paris). The 22-year-old South Tyrolean talent, meanwhile, spoke about himself to Financial Times: “I was really good at skiing, not so good at tennis – his words -. When I was 12 or 13, I took part in a race, and it was my first downhill race. You go there and you have to jump 30 or 40 meters, and when you’re a child it’s scary, for me it was. So I said to myself: maybe I’m too scared to go skiing. I chose to play tennis because for me it is a healthy competition.”
The strong point for his victories “is definitely the mental part – he adds -. When you ski and make a mistake, you can’t win the race. If you fall you’re out of the competition”. In tennis, however, you can also be down 0-40 and get to match point in a row for the other player, before coming back and winning, as Sinner did in the Davis Cup against Djokovic’s Serbia, who he could soon overtake him as number one in the world. At home, in South Tyrol, there is the opportunity to rest: “Days at home are really important to me because they give me the feeling of when I was young – he says again – I go to the slopes, ski a little, have fun with my friends. In my mind, it’s like going back to the old days , and that’s really, really nice for me: these are maybe the most special days I can have.”
Jannik, over the years, has also grown from a physical point of view: “At the moment I’m more in the gym than on the tennis court – he said again -. Every body is different: I, for example, need to be strong and stable. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I took this extra step, because physically I grew up. When I was 20, I didn’t have the body of a 20-year-old yet and you have to accept that…”. About the friend Carlos Alcarazfinally, he concludes: “It’s really nice to see when someone young achieves something great. I think that’s what the sport needs. We have a really good relationship on and off the pitch. We give everything we have and we also try to entertain the public, perhaps him more so, because he has spectacular shots. I really like to see him play.”
