After many years of Italy's absence from the world championships and rankings, the young Italian tennis player Jannik Sinner, 19, represents the new hope for a turning point and for regaining an important position. Sinner closed 2020 with the victory at the ATP in Sofia and is the youngest Italian to win a tournament in the Open era. A promise of tennis that has also rekindled the passion for this underrated sport in recent years, the spotlight has gone out after the fantastic career of Flavia Pennetta, winner of the 2015 US Open, the second Italian to win such a prestigious trophy.
Sinner is a champion on the tennis court but proves to be very mature even in real life, assuming a mature professional attitude, dedicating a lot of time to training and above all surrounded and protected by the affection of his family and friends, his most great strength that helps him concentrate on the playing field. Yet the tennis player as a child was a promise of skiing, winning several competitions and designated by many as the future champion of the discipline. In those years, however, Sinner also had a lot of fun playing tennis, although he was anything but a champion: he could barely keep the weight of the racket itself, perform a backhand or dribble casually.
But these difficulties did not demoralize him, on the contrary they encouraged him to commit himself more and more, not to give up and to concentrate all his energies in tennis to the point of giving up skiing to devote himself full time to that heavy but so fascinating racket. Slowly he begins to participate in the first tournaments, accumulating experience and also many victories that have pushed him higher and higher in the ranking of the best Under 20 players until he reaches the 37th position as best ranking, reached on November 16, 2020, thanks to which currently figures as the best placed tennis player among the Under-20s.
The goals for 2021? At the moment, playing tennis is his only goal because by challenging his opponents, he learns his faults faster, on which it is then possible to train and correct them. Jannik hopes to be able to play at least 60 games and admits that his strong point is the backhand while he is weaker in the net game. His physique is agile and slender and also very fast in the shots. Sinner has repeatedly confirmed that tennis is a sport in which 70% of success depends on your head, the willpower and the clarity with which you face the opponent while the remaining 30% is the skill of the athlete.
This explains how fundamental is the concentration of the players before and during the match and how all this is decisive in a match beyond the individual skills. Sinner has many challenges ahead of him and certainly has the awareness of being a talent that is not yet mature in sporting terms, but at just 19 he has shown that he has solid foundations on which to build his career that we hope will be full of satisfaction and successes and above all it can be an example to the many young people who today think that football is the only sport that matters.
