Twelve months ago, the world witnessed arguably the greatest French Open final of all time as Carlos Alcaraz rallied from two sets down to break the heart of Jannik Sinner and claim his second straight Parisian crown. Weeks before that triumph, the Spanish prodigy had also reigned supreme at the Italian Open, often considered the final warm-up before hitting the clay in the City of Lights. Fast forward to now, however, and the defending champion is nowhere to be seen.
Alcaraz’s withdrawal notice landed barely a fortnight prior to the Italian Open getting underway. A wrist injury meant that he would not only not be headed to Rome, but he would also be surrendering his French Open title as well, ending the dream of a famous three-peat. For Jannik Sinner, the door has never been wider ajar for glory both at home and abroad.
Now the man who inflicted his bitterest defeat has gifted Sinner a wide-open bracket in Rome, and the Foro Italico crowd — loud, passionate, borderline desperate — wants its coronation. He is safely through to the third round on home clay, and online betting sites make him the clear favorite to reign supreme. The latest odds from the Sportaza online sportsbook makes the Italian a 1/3 frontrunner to get the job done before heading across the French border with the burning motivation of unfinished business.
But Rome has a habit of lying. Before Sinner rides this momentum into Paris, consider three men who rode it before him — and what Paris did to them when they arrived.
Daniil Medvedev: 2023
Daniil Medvedev hadn’t won a single match in Rome in three previous visits heading into the 2023 Italian Open. He was openly mocked as a surface specialist in reverse — elite on hard courts, irrelevant on clay. Then, he flipped the script as he knocked off Stefanos Tsitsipas, Alexander Zverev, and finally Holger Rune — 7-5, 7-5 in the showpiece — to improbably capture his maiden clay-court title of any kind. With Rafael Nadal missing Roland Garros through injury, the Russian then headed to Paris as the No. 2 seed, Rome champion, and a genuine title contender.
Thiago Seyboth Wild was ranked 172nd in the world and had never won a Grand Slam match in his life before that first round clash with Medvedev. And for three sets, the heavy favourite was quietly going about his business, leading two sets to one, and Rome’s momentum looked real. Then the Brazilian’s thunderous forehands began finding lines they had no right to find. One bazooka after another continued to find its mark, and the rank outsider went on to break Medvedev’s serve three times in the fifth set to seal a stunning upset win.
The scoreboard read 7-6(5), 6-7(6), 2-6, 6-3, 6-4. Four hours and fifteen minutes. Silence descended over Philippe Chatrier — the particular silence of a crowd that has just watched something it cannot fully process. World No. 2. Rome champion. Eliminated in the first round by a man making his Grand Slam debut.
Alexander Zverev: 2017
Beat Djokovic. Beat nobody else. Gone.
Nine days. That’s the entire gap between Alexander Zverev becoming the first player born in the 1990s to win a Masters 1000 event — a 6-4, 6-3 dismantling of Novak Djokovic in the Rome final that announced him as the next great thing in men’s tennis — and sitting in the Roland Garros locker room after Fernando Verdasco had just taken him apart, 6-4, 3-6, 6-4, 6-2, in round one. Twenty years old, the first German man ever to win at the Foro Italico, seeded ninth in Paris. Gone before the tournament had truly begun.
Here’s the thing about Verdasco that Rome’s intoxicating atmosphere had temporarily obscured: a crafty left-handed Spaniard who once beat Nadal in the first round of the Australian Open is precisely the worst possible opponent for a 20-year-old riding a wave of inflated confidence. The lefty serve carved into the backhand, and the heavy clay-court topspin continued to drag Zverev wide and offline.
The experienced operator read the impatience of youth — the urge to end points quickly, to replicate Rome’s clean, aggressive tennis — and neutralized it point by point. Rome had briefly convinced Zverev he’d arrived. Verdasco’s left hand provided a blunter assessment.
Novak Djokovic: 2015
In 2015, Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open, claimed four of five Masters 1000 titles, and rode a 22-match winning streak into Rome. There, he swept through the draw without dropping a set, beating boogey-men Nadal and Dominic Thiem en route to the final, where he crushed Roger Federer, a man who had never won in Rome across fifteen appearances, 6-4, 6-3 in the final. The career Grand Slam — tennis’s most elusive prize, the thing that had stalked Djokovic through two Roland Garros finals against the same Nadal — suddenly felt inevitable.
Paris delivered almost everything. In the quarterfinals, Djokovic finally beat Nadal at the French Open, and he did so in straight sets, dominating in a 7-5, 6-3, 6-1 win. Read that again. Nadal. At Roland Garros. The man who had defined those courts for a decade.
Djokovic snapped a 39-match winning streak and did it with something approaching contempt, breaking the great clay-court dynasty of the modern era and becoming just the second man ever to beat the Spaniard at the tournament in which he built his seismic legacy. He then beat Murray in the semi-finals and stood one match from tennis immortality and the career grand slam.
Stan Wawrinka stood across the net in the final. And then the backhand came — flat, devastating, produced at the highest possible moment by a man who had absolutely no business being that brilliant on that afternoon. Four sets: 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4. Djokovic had conquered Nadal at Roland Garros — finally, definitively, in three crushing sets — and still couldn’t lift the trophy. That’s not a flop in the conventional sense. It’s something crueller: a campaign of extraordinary brilliance undone at the very last breath, by a single backhand wing operating at its absolute ceiling. The Italian Open had made him believe. Paris confirmed the belief was earned. Wawrinka reminded him that earned belief and a winner’s trophy are not the same thing.