The Olympus of tennis is capped by money, a lot of money. The 2024 ATP Finals champion will receive a check for 4.8 million dollars next Sunday, a little less than 4.5 million euros. It is the highest prize in the history of the Association of Tennis Professionals, well above what Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz earned in the richest of the two seasonal slams won by each, the US Open for the Italian (3.6 million dollars) , the Championships for the Spaniard (3.45 million). The overprice phenomenon has not been good for professional football, so we should take advantage of that experience. Without moralism, I believe that introducing forms of category solidarity and also aimed at general society would be an appreciated signal from the Top 10.
The modest greats of tennis
There is a difference, however. Unlike many of the highest-paid footballers who lead lives bordering on debauchery, all the great tennis players are forced into an almost monastic moderation. Whoever goes wrong leaves the scene. Sinner has played over seventy official matches in 315 days this year, one every 4.3 days. He only missed six because he was on the pitch and trained in the gym every day for eight, nine, ten hours and slept for the same number.
De Minaur with no escape
Tonight in Turin the world number 1 faces Alex de Minaur for the eighth time, and keeps him at a distance as on previous occasions. Only when Jannik retired in the round of 16 in Bercy last year did the Australian with solid Spanish roots get through. A characteristic of the most successful Italian in the history of tennis is overpowering his opponents without them being aware of it. Because he respects them all, he never gives the impression of dominating them. He lets them play, accepts that sometimes they have the upper hand without taking it out on them or the referee, with the coaches in the corner, the racket, the bad luck. When he makes something wrong, like in the break suffered today at the beginning of the first set, he resets, corrects himself, puts things back in place. Taking four consecutive games, he closes at 6-3. In the second partial, he gives something to Alex and the show. Without overdoing it, he gets the break in the fifth game and then defends it easily (6-4).
Medvedev loses the match and his head
In the other singles of the day, played in the afternoon, Taylor Fritz beat Daniil Medvedev in two sets, who was clearly in difficulty enough to lose his composure and even his head. The Russian ATP number 4 probably realizes that the gap with Jannik and Carlos is widening and that even Alexander Zverev is no longer within his reach. The Californian, who is number 5 in the world rankings, instead played calmly, constantly ahead of his opponent until the final 6-4 6-3.
Arab money, Italian passion
Having returned from the United States where I followed the elections closely, I read in the Italian newspapers that Donald Trump would not have returned to the presidency of the United States if Elon Musk’s dollars had not come to his rescue. Don’t believe it, because “follow the money” is a golden rule for understanding choices and phenomena, but it doesn’t always explain everything. Let’s take the ATP Finals, which Turin hosts for the fourth consecutive time: I hear that from 2026 they will move to Riyadh, as the Next Gen ATP Finals and the WTA Finals have already done due to the fact that “the Saudis have infinite economic capacity” . It doesn’t seem like it has to be this way. Mohammed bin Salman can certainly put more money on the table than Giorgia Meloni, but the passion shown by the public at the Inalpi (formerly Alpitour) Arena and the Italian organizational skills will influence the decisions of the ATP president Andrea Gaudenzi’s team, who could opt for a Turin-Milan relay of enormous symbolic and economic value. In fact, from 2027, the facilities under construction in Santa Giulia, which is Rogoredo, will be available to host over sixteen thousand spectators for the Winter Olympics, a quarter more than the current ones in the Piedmontese capital, which are permanently sold out. Until at least 2030, Italy would thus remain the only tournament that competes with the slams for the attention of the global audience. The 12 million euros per year of extra contribution requested by the ATP, which operates in close collaboration with the FITP and local governments, could obtain a zero-risk guarantee from the Ministry of Sport: indeed, our country would gain a lot, as explains in great detail the president of FITP, Angelo Binaghi, unbeatable in terms of management skills and imagination. The Saudis, as compensation for not being awarded the Finals, would have the right to shortly stage the tenth ATP 1000 of the season.
Nole’s suspicious forfeit
The “trace the money” rule doesn’t even serve to explain defending champion Novak Djokovic’s renunciation of the Finals. By playing the three round robin matches, the 2024 Olympic champion would have pocketed just under a million dollars, i.e. 335 thousand (309 thousand euros) for the debut match, whether won or lost, and another 350 thousand for each success in the two subsequent rounds. The reason for the forfeit – a complaint of the usual knee – did not convince anyone. Rather, it is clear that Nole intends to face the next season, that of his thirty-eighth birthday, with prospects as a protagonist starting from Melbourne, where he has triumphed ten times.
It is not out of joy for the super prize just won – the 4.8 million dollars of the WTA Finals, the same amount as the twin men’s tournament – that yesterday at the end of the victorious match against the Chinese Olympic gold medalist Zheng Qinwen (3-6 6-4 7-6) Coco Gauff threw herself on the ground. He later said: “I never wanted to do something like that. I promised myself that I would reserve scenes of jubilation like this only for Grand Slam tournaments. But honestly, the way the match went, I thought ‘I’m tired, I want to lie down on the ground’.” After the crisis in the seventh game of the third set, which led her to respond 5-4 down, the American had in fact reacted and reversed the flow of the match: “I just tried to live the moment honestly, I’m really proud of myself”. His manager will take care of the money. For now.
#Jannik #Sinner #money #passion
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