As Roland Garros enters its second week, there is an elephant in the room that is hard to avoid: not so much Jannik Sinner’s elimination, significant as it is for the tournament, but the way it happened.
The easy explanation is always the same: heat, cramps, fatigue. It works because it is visible. In Rome, we saw Sinner trembling, trying to drink, struggling to swallow, retching. In Paris, we saw him dominate Juan Manuel Cerundolo for two and a half sets, then disappear from the match. In Melbourne, against Rune, we saw a player white in the face, covered in towels, forced to leave the court to be checked. But the interesting part of Sinner’s body is not the one we see on television. It is the one that, for years, the people around him have described as a system to be understood, calibrated and protected.
The point is not to make a diagnosis from the outside. That would be wrong and pointless. The point is to understand why these episodes are so striking in Sinner’s case. Not because he is a weak athlete. Quite the opposite: because Sinner became world number one by building his tennis around almost total control. Control of time, of the point, of risk, of the body. When that control breaks down, the effect is all the more violent.
Darren Cahill explained it well when speaking about the work that helped take Sinner to world number one. In Miami, in 2024, he gave a central share of the credit for Sinner’s physical growth to his fitness coach:
“Two words: Umberto Ferrara.”
Then he added:
“You don’t try to pack in six months of work into two months.”
And again, speaking about Sinner’s relationship with the signals coming from his body:
“Now he has a lot more confidence in his body.”
Cahill is not describing an athlete who has simply become stronger. He is describing a construction: timing, progression, the ability to read physical signals, trust in one’s own body.
Photo: Luce Martini
Ferrara, as early as 2023, had described Sinner as an athlete who needed to be built physically, not as an already complete athletic phenomenon. The key sentence is this:
“I had in front of me a tall, lean boy, about two metres and fairly thin.”
This is the first key to avoiding cliché. Sinner was not described by his fitness coach as a raw physical phenomenon, in the way Alcaraz is, someone who steps on court with an athletic presence that is almost brutal in its immediacy. Sinner was built. His physicality became a form of efficiency: mobility, stability, endurance, recovery, the ability to stay in the rally without waste.
It is no coincidence that, when he explained Ferrara’s return to the team in the summer of 2025, despite the Clostebol affair, he used precisely that language: he needed someone who knew his “functioning” better, someone with whom he had worked on mobility, stability and endurance.
He said:
“I needed someone who knew my body better.”
And then:
“We worked on every area of my body: on mobility, on stability, and my endurance also improved.”
This is a central statement. Sinner himself links the choice of fitness coach not to a generic idea of training, but to a specific knowledge of his body.
Marco Panichi added perhaps the most interesting word: autonomic. In 2025, speaking about Sinner’s motor talent, he put it this way:
“We turned work micro-cycles into macro-cycles, we went into the specific and the detailed, we spent a lot of time gathering data on Jannik, applying training modules to put him in a position to make another important leap in quality…
…It is the variety in the work protocol that allows us to understand whether we are moving in the right direction. Coordination, stamina, the autonomic aspect. From my point of view, his most extraordinary talent is the management of situations, whether it is a training session or a very tight match: he has a rare operational calm in the moments that matter. Mind and body are an integrated system: when one pulls him down, the other pushes him up.”
These sentences should be taken for what they say, without turning them into a diagnosis. But they say a lot. Panichi is not speaking only about muscles, speed or strength. He is speaking about coordination, endurance, internal regulation, the relationship between mind and body. The autonomic aspect concerns the autonomic nervous system: heartbeat, sweating, thermoregulation, blood pressure, activation, recovery. In other words, he describes Sinner as an athlete whose superiority also depends on his capacity to regulate himself.
The work with Riccardo Ceccarelli points in the same direction. Ceccarelli says his relationship with Sinner began in 2020, and that the work was not about a generic “winning mentality”, but about managing internal states and external stimuli:
“As well as developing greater self-awareness, we worked a lot on immunity to external factors: climate, court conditions, crowd, opponent.”
It is an important sentence because it shifts the discussion from the isolated muscle to the athlete’s body as a whole: perception, heartbeat, fatigue, clarity, context.
Within this frame, the physical episodes of recent years become more interesting. Not because they form a single diagnosis, but because they all seem to put that very system of control under strain.
The Rune case, Australian Open 2025, has to be placed precisely: 20 January 2025, fourth round, Sinner beat Holger Rune 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2. After the match, Sinner said the problem had not suddenly appeared during the match:
“This morning was a very strange morning, because I didn’t even warm up today.”
And again:
“I knew in my mind already before the match that I would struggle today.”
That is the key. Not a collapse out of nowhere, but a match that had already begun inside an abnormal physical condition.
A few days later, Simone Vagnozzi confirmed that the problem had existed before the match:
“He woke up feeling tired.”
And he specified:
“He had a bit of a headache, a bit of stomach pain.”
Vagnozzi then explained that humidity and overexertion had made the problem worse. Here too, the match does not create everything: it makes public something that already existed before he walked on court.
Cahill, after that tournament, was even clearer. Speaking about the Rune case, he said:
“We didn’t know if he was going to step on the court.”
And then:
“We knew from the day before he wasn’t feeling great.”
The visual phrase, the one that stays with you, is this:
“He looked as white as a sheet.”
This is not a “figure of speech”. It is a description of the physical state in which Sinner arrived at the court.
At Cincinnati 2025, the point becomes even clearer because the final against Alcaraz practically never begins. Sinner retires after five games. Cahill, speaking to ESPN, leaves little room for creative interpretations:
“He was feeling a little better.”
And then:
“He’ll rest, that’s the plan.”
It is reported that Cahill attributed the problem to a virus. Here too: not heat, not cramps, not tension. A condition that existed before the match.
Rome 2026 is the episode that puts the laziest explanation under pressure. Against Medvedev, the scene cannot be reduced to the usual heat explanation. Gazzetta describes the moment like this:
“Sinner’s right hand was visibly trembling.”
And again:
“he struggled to swallow.”
Earlier, the same article reports that Sinner went to the corner of the court and vomited, “perhaps because of fatigue, perhaps because he was unwell”. The important point is not clinical precision, which is absent. It is the nature of the scene: trembling, nausea, difficulty drinking, stiffness, a body not responding normally.
When he was asked what had happened, Sinner did not offer a neat explanation. The sentence reported by Repubblica is:
“I can’t answer that question.”
It is an interesting non-answer because it does not close the case inside a convenient word. He gives it no neat label, neither cramps nor heat, and he does not brush it off as nothing. He leaves the problem where it is, in a physical grey area.
Then comes Roland-Garros 2026. Here, the public narrative risks becoming even more superficial, because the temperature offers a convenient way out. But Sinner himself downplays that reading. After the collapse against Juan Manuel Cerundolo, he says:
“I started to feel very dizzy.”
Then:
“I didn’t have a lot of energy.”
And again:
“I just hit the wall.”
Above all, he links everything to a condition already present when he woke up:
“I woke up this morning, I didn’t feel very well.”
These sentences are the heart of the piece. They do not merely describe a muscle seizing up. They describe dizziness, low energy, feeling unwell before the match, a general loss of function.
In the same post-match, Sinner also ruled out heat as the central explanation:
“It was warm, but not crazy warm.”
And again:
“It was nothing against the heat, nothing against the weather.”
So the piece cannot be “Sinner suffers in the heat”. That would be weak and contrary to the player’s own words. Heat can be a factor on some days. But it is not the general key.
The most convincing convergence is not heat. It is lexical and technical. Ferrara speaks about a tall, lean body that had to be built. Cahill speaks about progression, confidence and the ability to read physical signals. Sinner brings Ferrara back because he knows his body better. Panichi speaks about coordination, stamina and the autonomic aspect. Ceccarelli speaks about self-awareness and external factors. Vagnozzi and Cahill, in the Rune case, describe an athlete who was already compromised before the match.
This convergence does not say that Sinner “has something”. It says something subtler: Sinner is an athlete whose superiority depends on extremely fine bodily regulation. He is not only a great ball-striker, not only a technically clean player. He is an athlete who has learnt to stay inside a very narrow zone of efficiency: little waste, few outward signs, very little disorder.
That is why his physical episodes are so striking. Not because they are all the same. They are not. Rune looks like a case of general malaise already present before the match. Cincinnati is a virus. Rome is a more opaque physical crisis, without heat as the central explanation. Paris is a broader physical shutdown on a day that began badly. The very variety of the episodes prevents any single diagnosis. But variety does not erase the thread: when Sinner moves outside his zone of regulation, his tennis can shift quickly from control to disappearance.
This is where the words “heat and cramps” become inadequate. Cramps are the easiest part to see, when they are there. But they do not explain the white face in Melbourne, the virus in Cincinnati, the tremors in Rome, the dizziness in Paris. And above all, they do not explain the particular relationship between Sinner and his own body, a relationship his entourage has described for years as a work of knowledge, adaptation and control.
Sinner’s body is not a mystery to be solved with a formula. It is a technical system. It has been built, observed, modified, protected. And on the days when something alters, the match does not create the problem: it brings it into the light. That is why the case is interesting. Not because Sinner is fragile, but because the opposite is true: he is a player who normally hides the body better than almost anyone. When that body becomes visible, it means that something in the system of control has stopped working as it usually does.
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