What did you do when it happened? Novak Djokovic’s eyes were as wide as tennis balls. Casper Ruud was conversing with Nordic gods so that he might channel their strength. Learner Tien looked like he’d seen a ghost. Alexander Zverev was probably high out of his mind, rather than thinking about how he’ll manage to choke away this opportunity. Rafael Nadal was tanning on a Mallorcan beach, turning this into a teaching moment for his young children: “Back in my day, the heavy favorite would dance unaffected in the hot sun’s rays at Roland-Garros, shaping the light with his topspin forehand, grunting like a bull, and always, always converting his two-set leads.” Jannik Sinner is out in the second round of a tournament we all assumed he would win, and in his wake the rest of the field will anxiously fight for a trophy they may never get this clean a look at again. 

Nobody even pretended to flag this summit with Juan Manuel Cerundolo, the less accomplished Cerundolo brother, with upset potential. I woke up in time for the fourth set, skeptical that the barrage of Bluesky posts insisting that a cramp-stricken Sinner was in trouble held water. He’d survived cramps to beat Eliot Spizzirri in Melbourne just a few months ago. His serve afforded him a safety net when he didn’t want to baseline, and his forehand could thump winners from anywhere on the court. Maybe against a top player his state would spell doom, but Cerundolo? He’d get tired or crampy before long too, and without a floor as high as Sinner’s (much less a serve), his level would plunge straight into hell. I’d seen this movie before, usually with Novak Djokovic as the protagonist, and thought I knew what to expect. 

Something different happened today. After cruising to a 6–3, 6–2, 5–1 lead, Sinner shattered into more shards than on his worst days to date; reassembling them proved harder than the 1,000-piece disaster of a puzzle that’s been sitting on my kitchen table for two weeks. He lost 18 points in a row. Serving for the match for a second time at 5–4, he looked so woozy that chair umpire Aurélie Tourte descended from on high and granted him a mid-game trip off court to vomit. Sinner came back and finished blowing the third set. Early in the fourth, he lined up break points at 1–1 and 1–3, then two more at 1–4 in the fifth, and went 0/7. On one of them, he launched a forehand onslaught, then, when Cerundolo turned his aggression back on him, bailed on the point, going stock-still and letting a winner sail past him. He missed enough overheads to make Novak wince. I didn’t write Jannik off until Cerundolo held for 5–1 in the decider, but it’s clear now that any glimmer of victory disappeared long before that. 

Sinner said in his post-match press conference that the 90-degree day didn’t impact his performance, instead noting that he woke up feeling poor and felt dizzy and drained on the court. Whether that or his self-diagnosis is a sufficient ailment to mollify critics of his performance is hard to say. From two sets and 5–1 up, a player as good as Sinner probably should have found a way to land the plane even if he’d been playing from his knees. 

It’s almost as if Sinner’s five-set losses happen to a weaker twin brother than the one who gets all the wins. He’s as dominant in victory as any player I’ve ever seen, but his defeats are pure nightmare fuel: physical breakdowns, blown leads, lost match points. He’s almost always clutch, at least the kind of clutch you need to fire aces and winners at will when break point down, so it’s difficult to diagnose exactly what’s going wrong here. On the wrong days, he disappears into the background of his own matches. His record in close, long matches is so atrocious it’s become a meme. The Roland-Garros final last year, which Sinner lost to Alcaraz despite leading by two sets and a break and holding three match points in the fourth set, seemed impossible to top for trauma. He’s doing his best. So far in 2026, Sinner’s Grand Slam event efforts have included a five-set loss to Djokovic, in which he led two sets to one and went 2/18 on break points, and today. 

In the months preceding this tournament, Sinner looked to have engineered an approximate tennis endgame. You serve with heat and precision. You construct a backhand so powerful and spinny it resembles a forehand, and a forehand even more powerful and spinnier than that. You hit them both so deep and hard that whatever comes back makes for easy cleanup, which provides minimal stress on your merely good drop shots and volleys. You are lanky, and rangy, and quick, and you always remain balanced on defense. Armed with all that, Sinner won 30 matches in a row. Most weren’t close; he still didn’t feel at real risk of losing the ones that were. He was vulnerable in the Monte-Carlo final against Carlos Alcaraz, his only rival, and still won that in straight sets. And then, early in a tournament Sinner was projected to dominate, he had a complete breakdown when on the brink of a typical landslide win. Maybe the lesson here is that this sport is too unrelenting to allow anybody to solve it. 

Then again, maybe it’s this tournament. Players are dropping like flies. Hailey Baptiste hurt her left knee while retreating to hit a forehand and couldn’t leave the court on her own power. Jakub Mensik collapsed to the ground after a five-set win in the second round, then continued to lie there for minutes, unable to move. Thanasi Kokkinakis’ feel-good comeback was derailed by the same shoulder injury that sidelined him for 18 months. Alcaraz couldn’t play Roland-Garros thanks to a wrist injury, but we’re also missing Jack Draper, Arthur Fils, Holger Rune, Lorenzo Musetti, Sebastian Korda, and others. The heat might be a hazard during the matches; the ever-increasing physicality of the sport itself is beginning to feel like a hazard on its own. 

Anxiety over further injuries aside, the loss of Sinner from the draw makes me more excited for the next week and a half. Where we once projected coronation, we will have chaos. The Sincaraz show deserves a hiatus after dominating nine consecutive majors, and Roland-Garros will be just fine with reduced ticket prices to certain men’s matches. Everybody left in the draw has watched their chances to win magnify into something real, which should bleed into the points and results. Give me moonball first-set rallies between debut quarterfinalists too riddled with anxiety to hit the ball. Give me a teenage finalist. Give me ferocious performances from underdogs intent on taking out the remaining favorites. Give me a Matteo Berrettini renaissance. Give me something new.