Men's tennis skips a generation

Tennis dominance has shifted from the Big 3 to Alcaraz and Sinner, leaving a whole generation of players in the shade

- Arun Janardhan

When Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner slugged it out for hours at the Roland Garros final in Paris last month, aside from the quality of play, the intensity of shot-making deep into the fifth set and sheer unpredictability, another aspect became strikingly clear. Sinner-Alcaraz have lapped an entire generation of tennis players, leaving them squished between two eras of dominance.

In the first Grand Slam final between two men born in the 2000s, Alcaraz, 22, saved three match points to beat 23-year-old Sinner 4-6, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (3), 7-6 (10-2) at the French Open, two weeks ago. The quality of the match was such that player-turned-analyst John McEnroe told TNT Sports: "I'm saying Sinner and Alcaraz against (Rafael) Nadal on clay—you would make a serious argument with both guys that they would be favored to beat Nadal at his best."

It was expected that when the greatest generation of male tennis players, including Roger Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic, leave the sport, the next gen to take over would be the one immediately after. Mathematically, it meant players born in the 1990s, after the Big Three, who are all children of the 1980s.

Federer quit the sport in 2022, Nadal last year. Djokovic is battling it out a little longer, while chasing his 25th Grand Slam singles title. But his fiercest challengers are 15 years or more younger, while it looks increasingly likely that the 1990s generation would simply miss the boat or—to use a tennis analogy—miss their shot at it.

Daniil Medvedev, Alexander Zverev, Stefanos Tsitsipas—and to a lesser extent Andrey Rublev, Taylor Fritz and Casper Ruud—waited in vain for too long, and seem to have been simply left behind.