Sinner and the doping case: ‘He showed me who my friend really was’

“It showed me who was really my friend and who wasn’t. I realized that people we thought were friends weren’t, while others I didn’t think were friends were and are.” It is a passage relating to the doping case of the interview with Jannik Sinnercontained in the original Sky Sport production ‘Jannik, beyond tennis – Chapter 3’, broadcast from Friday 25 October.

Sinner: “At the US Open I looked around to observe the gazes of others”

“It was a delicate period – adds Sinner -, I didn’t know how to behave, things weren’t under my control. I didn’t sleep, like the evening before the match against Medvedev (quarter-finals at Wimbledon, ed.). One morning instead I I woke up and realized that the judge’s decision didn’t depend on me either. At the US Open, after the case became public knowledge, I had to change my training program, I looked around to observe the looks of others.”

The Importance of Team

A difficult period, in which “my team was close to me all the time because I needed it. For example, Darren (Cahill, ed.) didn’t go home to Australia and came to me, he was with me, my dad came. Thanks to them I felt safe, protected.” Tennis, he concludes, “is my job and my passion. The problem and the work had to be separated. And I have always tried to feel good on the court, I have always prepared myself mentally to play well and in the end precisely to I succeeded in doing this. Also because, this is the most important thing, if I had known that it was my fault, in my opinion I wouldn’t have played like that.”

“I will play another 15 years”

Sinner explains that “if I want to go home tomorrow I can go, but I don’t want to because my career began when I left home at 13 and a half years old. Now I’m 23 years old and I’ve reached the point I’ve always dreamed of: becoming number one. It’s right now that you have to continue to work and improve, because there are all the players who want to chase you.” And on the future: “I’ll play for another 15 years and let’s hope that my body holds up. You think that 15 years is a long time, but that’s not the case because today I said to myself ‘this year has gone by really fast’. We’re trying to make all the choices to keep playing as long as possible, but we can’t even throw time away because it’s a nice balance of improvement. Work, desire to win and have the people you want around you who can help you.”