Sinner vs. Alcaraz: The 'Changeover' to a New Generation Is Here
Ahead of the French Open final, a conversation with author Giri Nathan about the rivalry that has completely taken over men's tennis.
PARIS, France — As the Sunday’s men’s final was shaping up at Roland Garros between No. 1 Jannik Sinner and No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz, I was sure who I wanted to discuss this newly preeminent rivalry with: Giri Nathan, a writer at Defector whose forthcoming book Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis follows Sinner and Alcaraz through the 2024 season.
These guys are the story of men’s tennis right now, point blank, period. After Sunday, their long-awaited first meeting in a major final, they will have combined to win the last six consecutive major singles titles. This book is the story of the story right now.
Giri, as anyone who has read him will know, is a phenomenal writer, and his book—which I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of last month— brings fresh, vivid new life to tennis writing in the same way that Sinner and Alcaraz have brought it to the sport itself.
Giri and I talked over Zoom last night after the second semifinal, and here is that conversation for y’all to enjoy.
Also as a small bonus for subscribers, the audio of our conversation is available below the paywall at the bottom, if you’d rather listen to us than read us.
Enjoy!
A Conversation with Changeover author Giri Nathan:
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Giri, the main action of your book ends in 2024, and so I'm curious to pick up where you left off: What have you made of these two guys in 2025?
Giri Nathan: I mean, in some ways, it's a little too on the nose for the future that I was trying to lay out in the book. It's like, wow, it really came together too cleanly, too quickly, where I guess it's now six slams in a row that will be won by these guys. So the era that they were ushering in is—the ushering is over; we're just in it. We're in it right now.
It's been fun. I think the maybe one aspect that's been a little disappointing, narratively, is wanting that kind of upper middle class of the tour to take shape: guys who you think actually could realistically challenge them in best-of-five. But maybe that'll just take a little time. And maybe there are some names.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Well, I was talking to someone about that today: I think there's a pretty clear for me, No. 3 and No. 4, in some order in the power rankings right now, who are Musetti and Draper. I would put them ahead of Zverev. And yeah, those are same-generation guys; it's more 2000sification of the tour.
Before Djokovic came in to the press room and started talking retirement, I was going to ask him something kind of generation-coded. Like, what is it that these two guys, Sinner and Alcaraz, have that like the 90s boys did not? It just seems like even more clear this year, with Draper, with Musetti, with Mensik, that this is the generation.
And people like Medvedev, like Zverev, like Tsitsipas, are looking even more passed-over and—I'm not going to say 'washed'—but they don't look like the future, let's put it that way.
Giri Nathan: Yeah, I think that's kind of why we're seeing, you know, Tsitsipas changing up his racket; Medvedev, in the middle of a match, changing his string setup—if I remember correctly, Eubanks pointed it out on the call: he went from gut poly to just like a pure poly setup mid-match, which I've certainly never seen before. So yeah, these guys who are getting leapfrogged a little bit find themselves mid-career and searching for new solutions, I guess you could say.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Let's talk about each of the guys separately and then look at the final.
Let's start with Alcaraz, because he won first in chronological semifinal order. What have you made of his 2025? It's been up and down, hot and cold, feast or famine—whatever other opposite thing I can throw in there.
For the rankings, for taking over from Sinner during his suspension, pole position was Zverev by the numbers, but Zverev came nowhere close to seizing the moment. And then Alcaraz seized occasional moments and also had occasional weird faceplants, but then ends on a high in Rome. Yeah, what do you make of his deal, basically, this year?
Giri Nathan: Yeah, I mean, the feast-or-famine thing is very on brand for him, I guess. Now we're getting to the point where the only real flaw people can identify in his tennis is the fact that he can't bring his best on a consistent basis.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Including today, I would say, I think he was not great against Musetti in the first couple sets.
Giri Nathan: For sure, it was a very slow start. The focus is always drifting.
I think one theme we might be seeing emerge a little bit this season is the hard-court-versus-natural-surfaces distinction a little more: I feel like we're going to see Carlos much more reliable on on clay and grass over the course of his career and maybe a little flightier on the hard courts, particularly the faster ones, and particularly the indoor hard courts, which he's talked about in the past as not having such a natural feel for. Where he hit his stride this season, as we might expect, was the clay. And getting to beat, presumably, his two biggest rivals on clay, Musetti and Sinner, in Masters finals, gives you a very clear sense of where he is on that surface versus the rest of the competition.
But for sure, there were some dicey moments; the Goffin match, we're going to look back at with raised eyebrows in a couple of years.
And that Novak match in Melbourne, for sure, almost felt like an Aesop's fable or something: you see your competition hurting and limping, and you don't close him out decisively, and it can come back to hurt you in the end.
I feel like he very much learned his lesson there. But even in Paris, it seems like he's had a couple careless sets here and there. But then when he's locked in, he just looks absolutely absurd.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: I mean, the match against Damir Dzumhur in the third round here got way more interesting than it had any business doing. Our poor buddy Tumaini Carayol had to come rushing back to Roland Garros after leaving for the night, because Alcaraz is suddenly imploding against Dzumhur.
And, that's kind of always it, right? But that's sort of the good and the bad of him, that inconsistency. I saw someone on Twitter refer his inconsistency as a weapon, which I kind of liked.
His surprise package is part of his deal—and obviously it's a liability, also.
Let's set up Jannik, who has way less data this year. He won Australia, and then went to Doha and then took a deal.
Then he then kind of picked up where he left off in Rome—if not better; it was his biggest clay final ever. He lost to Carlos in that final, but what have you made of Jannik this year? On court, and off court, and everything. You just wrote about him for The Second Serve. But what do you make now of what you've seen of him, in what is, amazingly, only his third tournament of the year.
Giri Nathan: Yeah, really weird year. It feels like you can just purely pencil him into the final at hard court Slams now, but looking at the rest of his schedule is where things get a little more interesting. What I'm most interested with him is how much he can close the gap with Carlos on clay—and we're going to get a very real test of that on Sunday.
But yeah, the thing I tried to kind of flesh out in the little newsletter I did for The Second Serve this week was what a weird, interrupted season it has been for him—and yet it does seem like he more or less picked up where he left off. I saw the video of him having to leave the practice courts in Doha and pull out immediately upon the settlement with WADA. And then he was spending a couple months not allowed to practice on officially sanctioned tennis courts and having to scrounge and find non-active ATP players to practice with, but someone who's still good enough to give him a real practice. So he had this really funky couple of months where he's trying to just stay in form but he's kind of persona non grata on all official ATP environments.
So the fact that he did just show up again in Rome—probably a pretty friendly environment, as you could imagine, for him to come back home to—even then, I wasn't expecting him to go all the way to the final. I thought that was pretty impressive. And the match he played against Ruud is going to ring in my head for a long time. Just how decisive a rout that was—against another top 10 player and a clay specialist, in particular—was pretty wild.
But yeah, I wonder if we're seeing him loosen up a little bit more, interpersonally, the way we were seeing a little of before all the doping stuff came crashing down on him. We were joking about the fact that he made an unprompted comment about his dating life, which is just wild when you think about the Jannik of 2024.
Even before I knew the settlement was coming down, his summer—playing on clay, playing on grass—was really the thing I was curious about. Because now in my head I have this dichotomy: the hard courts go to Jannik and the natural surfaces go to Carlos. And it's obviously probably not as clean as that, but I'm really curious to see how big the gap is on Sunday, and then again on grass.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Yeah, that's how their trophies have been divided the last couple years, so it makes sense to have that yin and yang in your mind, at least as a sort of rule of thumb for them.
But yeah, it's interesting with with Jannik, too. I was there in Australia in 2024, and he was pretty light, and—relatively—fun and chipper. And then when I saw him again—I was not on the tour much last year—but I saw him again in Cincinnati. And he was much less fun and—I wouldn't say 'dour'—but definitely, just, flat. And obviously, we had no idea at the time that he was, that same week, doing hours-long Zoom hearings for his doping case.
So yeah, all of the more downbeat Jannik we got in 2024—and also in 2025 in Australia, he was not in a super jubilant mood in public, in the press room. He seemed pretty tight.
Though at the same time, he took all the doping questions head-on, which I appreciated. Including here, too: I asked him in his first press conference, something like 'You had a really friendly crowd in Rome, but you think it could be different as you work your way back from suspension elsewhere, including playing a French guy in the first round in Paris since he played Rinderknech. And he was, like, 'Very possibly—that's a reasonable thing to wonder.' He wasn't trying to say, 'No, no there's nothing to see here.' So I appreciated that, and also appreciated that he has seemed a little bit bit looser here.
And he, hopefully, should be. You don't want him to be forever scarred by this. Again, assuming everything in the facts of the case are as he says—and as WADA and the ITIA both affirm—then yeah, he doesn't really have much fault at all, so it should not be a cloud over his whole career. But we don't know how it's going to go, if he gets some more partisan atmosphere against him, if someone shouts something—who knows.
Giri Nathan: Post-Australia, it was pretty interesting to hear him make some comments about how the vibe in the locker room was just way off. And this was before, I guess, the settlement was made, so just the lingering unease about whether he got some kind of special treatment.
And he even, if I remember correctly, he said he was even considering taking a break from tennis just because socially he felt a little out of place in the locker room in Australia. He didn't end up having much choice in the matter, really: he took a three-month break right in the middle of the season as a result of the WADA settlement
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Obviously, it's not what he would have wanted, and I'm sure he wanted to play all those tournaments and would've been expected to win at least Indian Wells or Miami, I. would say, with his hard court prowess and how good his 2024 record was. But I also do wonder—and maybe I'll write about this more in the future, especially if he wins on Sunday—if a short absence of that kind of length can be good for a career, sometimes.
A couple examples I can think of: Marin Cilic had a ban that he started in Wimbledon and he came back in Paris Bercy, so it was like four months. And Barbora Strycova had one of six months, and she came back and played better than ever in her career. And Cilic came back and won the U.S. Open, less than a year later. So the treadmill of the tour, the hamster wheel of the tour, is exhausting. And getting a break—even a mandated break—I think can help, if you have your head right afterwards.
Which, I would say, I think Iga Swiatek doesn't seem to have, in contrast—I think she seems to have come out more wounded from her experience than Sinner. But I think it can be a blessing in disguise to get a break from the tour.
Giri Nathan: Yeah, I think the burnout theme is no longer something that players will occasionally mutter about; rather, it's not subtext, it's just the thing players are saying, kind of all the time. I guess the question is whether you will ever see a professional sports organization remove things from the schedule. You can't really put toothpaste back in the tube, it seems, in some cases: once they have revenue-generating events on the schedule, we rarely see schedules get trimmed down again.
It'll be something to follow, which of these two guys fares better in the year-long grind of the tour, if it continues in its current structure. Or who fares under a new structure, if that were to pass.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Speaking of grind, that makes me think of Alcaraz more, and specifically that Netflix documentary. I wrote about it on Bounces, and from talking to you I think you were more positive about it than I was.
I was somewhat impressed by it being not a puff piece, but I just thought it was weirdly a bummer in this way that I just don't know that anyone was asking for in an Alcaraz documentary. But I'm curious to hear more about what you made of it.
Giri Nathan: I think it was interesting for me to see that the outwardly joyous Carlos that the world gets to enjoy on a tennis court, that behind the scenes, there is a little more anxiety and turmoil and all that stuff. And that makes sense—that's how human beings are. I liked that the documentary looked at that bluntly and didn't sugarcoat it or shy away from it. So I kind of like that aspect of it. I also think part of their challenge, narratively, was to make some kind of dramatic tension in a season where Alcaraz won two slams and a silver medal. And yeah, it did have some natural narrative tension to it, but they definitely had to build things up—I think a little more than, perhaps, the reality.
But yeah, on balance I came out liking it a lot. But yeah, as I said to you, I generally have a really low bar for these sort of hagiography-type documentaries. So any time they show me a little more of the personality than I expected to see—and I'm sure even that extra peek is super-curated and in service of some larger brand goal—I just think it I was a little better than I expected.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: So let's get to the final: how do see this going on Sunday? I feel like Sinner's been playing better than Alcaraz in this tournament: his scorelines have been better, he's been more focused, he hasn't dropped a set. But then his head-to-head against Alcaraz lately has been one-sided.
One thing I wish that I had asked Sinner, if I had more time: I'm curious if he thinks the Six Kings win meant anything for him psychologically, getting a win against him with sort of high stakes. I'd be curious if he would completely dismiss it or if he would say there's something there.
Giri Nathan: Yeah, that is really interesting: definitely one thing I don't have a huge handle on is how much those exos mean to the players.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Usually not much, but that one had a LOT of cash on the table.
Giri Nathan: Yeah, that would be interesting to see what he says about that. I agree with your assessment of this tournament: Jannik has looked way more on task throughout the last six rounds, obviously hasn't dropped a set. But at the moment, I think I just have a slightly higher belief in Carlos' level on the surface. But you know, neither of them has lost a major final yet, so that record has to be broken one way or another on Sunday. But yeah, I guess gun to my head, I'd probably say Alcaraz in four, and maybe they play two tie breaks.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Put the gun down, there's nowhere near that much pressure on this occasion. But Alcaraz and four with two tiebreaks sounds like a good bet. Yeah, I'll say that sounds about right to me.
As Andy Roddick said after the Rome final: “If Sinner knows what's coming, it's a problem...against Carlos, I don't even know if Carlos knows what's coming all the time...you don't see Sinner looking unbalanced against anyone else in the world.”
And I agree: what makes Alcaraz win this matchup is that Alcaraz plays with that chaos factor in his game that unsettles Sinner's really precise, organized, orderly game. And actually, one thing that Sinner said in press after the semifinal was that one thing he's gotten from both Djokovic and Alcaraz was learning to be less predictable. That's something he attributed to them.
Giri Nathan: I do like any time one of those guys is asked to compare or contrast himself with the other.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Of course you love that shit, you wrote a book about it.
Giri Nathan: (Laughs) Yeah, really, that stuff was pandering to me.
But yeah, I think if you look at the Jannik of 2023 and the Jannik of 2025, he does a few more things now that he didn't quite have a real handle on that the time. I think a lot of that is just good coaching: I think the partnership with Simone Vagnozzi seems really productive for him. He always talks about him in glowing terms.
And I think they were focusing on a lot of those little things: the feel and the unpredictability and all the stuff that we don't necessarily associate immediately with Jannik Sinner and his personality and his tennis. So I could totally see that being something he wants to introduce in a way more overt way in their final on Sunday. Let's see what happens.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Djokovic and Sinner were both asked, after this final was set: do you think this rivalry is going to be up there with the Big 3 someday? And both of them, like, laughed in the person's face, essentially. And yes it's not there yet, but it's so interesting looking at the stair steps this rivalry has taken. I don't know if you've seen this—I think Oleg tweeted it—but I had a sense of it already myself, so I was crafting something similar in my head.
Their meetings in finals went from a 250, to a 500, to a 1000, and now to a Slam. And then their meetings at Slams went from a fourth round to a quarterfinal, to a semifinal, and now a final.
Giri Nathan: Yeah, incredibly clean.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Yeah, that doesn't happen, that's wild. So do you think this is the first of many? This rivalry, it's definitely the moment, it's definitely the last 18 months, 100 percent—maybe a little before that even. But do you think this is going to be something along the lines of any permutation of the Big Four, or Evert-Navratilova, or Serena-Sharapova—which was a long one, but compelling for different reasons than being competitive. Do you think this one is built to last?
Giri Nathan: I think it is. I think if I had to come up with a number, I'd be surprised if they didn't play eight major finals against each other; I guess that's kind of where my head is at. I don't, I probably couldn't go any further than that.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Eight is a lot.
Giri Nathan: If I'm looking at the existing competition, I don't see a ton of names that will interfere with that taking place. The whole joy of watching sports is that you get surprised by new faces and new generations emerging and making things more interesting than you predicted, but that's what it feels like to me now: this will be a really solidified rivalry with a lot of high stakes matches like the one we're about to see.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: And hopefully it'll give your a book tremendous shelf life. There's urgency to pre-order it now, but also it's something that people can get now and hang on until it's from time immemorial.
Giri Nathan: Otherwise it'll be a bizarre time capsule of a strange and misleading time.
Ben Rothenberg, Bounces: Whatever it is, the writing in the book is so, so good that it even if they're both exposed as complete hacks somehow—which I don't really see how that would happen—I think it's still a very worthwhile read. So I encourage people to check it out.
Giri, thank you very much.
Giri Nathan: Thank you.
Below the paywall for subscribers, the audio of my conversation with Giri Nathan. Thanks for reading, listening, and subscribing! -Ben
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