Ibiza nights and Tyrolean dawns: Alcaraz and Sinner after their Parisian epic
A week has drifted past, like a taffeta handkerchief carried off by the wind; yet in the maze of locker rooms the echo of their Paris duel still clicks, the pendulum of an ancient metronome. Five hours twenty-nine of opera buffa, a suspense fit to make Dumas blush: two sets and a break for Jannik Sinner, three squandered match points, and then the Murcian revolt—super-tiebreak, curtain, and fairy-lights.
Ibiza: Alcaraz plucks the moon—and a few short nights
“I can’t believe I won Roland-Garros,” marvelled Carlos Alcaraz, grin of Murcía and the swagger of young Hemingway, before swapping clay for Balearic sand. One dinner in a first-arrondissement trattoria, two dance steps, three days of carefree flight: the boy-king bolted to Ibiza as though turning a well-thumbed page. A pasodoble with Sergio Reguilón here, an embrace for Marco Verratti there, yet the five-time major champion kept his glass slipper firmly laced: “I had a good time. I danced a bit, nothing more… I’m getting older, my body can’t keep up. What matters is changing the air.”
Home again, a battery of tests in Murcia, a brother’s graduation, then London’s skyline beckoned. At Queen’s, the racquet doubled as a nine-iron: cheeky chip shots before facing Alejandro Davidovich Fokina—freshly married and no likelier to be well-rested.
South Tyrol: Sinner climbs his private Via Dolorosa
Jannik Sinner chose alpine hush over clubland thrash. South Tyrol welcomed him, tender as mountain milk: “I spent a few sleepless nights,” he confessed, eyes still misted by Paris. A father, a barbecue, a bicycle squeaking up the passes—he prescribed himself fresh air. “You don’t brush something like that aside so easily,” he admitted; but time, that great locksmith, polishes regret as it wears down stone.
Champion in Halle a year ago, he arrived with Darren Cahill (Simone Vagnozzi stayed home) and took a doubler’s jog with Lorenzo Sonego. The scoreboard read 2-6, 7-5, 10-3—just a false flat before Tuesday’s lone tilt with Germany’s Yannick Hanfmann, ranked 138th.
Two paths, one crossroads
One fled the capital for foam-flecked nights, the other sought refuge beneath childhood rafters; one laughs at his excesses, the other chews on missed chances. Yet beneath London’s pearly haze or Westphalia’s green vault they carry the same medal, recto and verso of a single Grand-Slam emotion. Sinner still mutters—“I often think back to those three missed match points”—while Alcaraz pinches himself to test the dream.
Roland is no more than a faded rose, but its thorns remain. On Tuesday, on grass, the lightning will serve again. As Stendhal warned, everything can be repaired—except missed opportunities. In Halle and at Queen’s, racquets raised like semaphore, each man will try to prove the old master wrong.
