Jannik Sinner Gets Too Close To The Sun, Falls Early In French Open

Going into Roland-Garros, there was clear consensus: The greatest threat to Jannik Sinner was the Sun itself. It's the type of snappy one-liner that gets slung on the TV broadcast a dozen times a day, but it wound up prescient as the No. 1 seed melted down Thursday in a stupefying second-round loss to Juan Manuel Cerundolo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spv9oa4rwUQ Outside of celestial bodies, the top men's player wasn't slated to face much of a threat at the clay Slam. His rival Carlos Alcaraz had recently announced that he would sit out the summer to recover from a wrist injury. Part-time tennis player Novak Djokovic had barely clocked in for work since his impressive win over Sinner in Australia in January. In the meantime, Sinner had regained the No. 1 ranking, stomped the tour, and racked up records. When he arrived in Paris, he was winding down one of the best clay seasons in tennis history, having swept the three Masters titles, a feat previously achieved by only Rafael Nadal. Along the way, Sinner dropped only one set. Zooming out slightly further, Sinner had strung together six Masters titles in a row, which had never been done. He became the second player to complete the full set of nine Masters trophies, and he accomplished it seven years faster than Djokovic. I could bore you with even more, but I'll leave you with this simple number: Sinner had a 30-match win streak heading into his second-round match at Roland-Garros. I expected that number to extend to 36, and for him to lift the title that brutally eluded him by just one point last season.