Sinner: “I win with my head. The doping case? I can’t control it anymore”
To Sky Sport: "I'll play for another 15 years, let's hope my physique holds up"
ROME – “I woke up one morning and said: ‘But in the end I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t know anything, and so for me it was already over, then what comes out of the judge, what can or can’t come out in the end I can no longer control, right?‘”. And if you wanted a sample of how the brain of the world number one tennis player works, here is the first excerpt of a very long interview given by Jannik Sinner to Sky Sport, broadcast tomorrow.
Sinner obviously talks about the doping case and reiterates that his is a mental tennis: “Everyone plays tennis well, the problem is always the small details. I managed to understand many things this season and I won many matches with mental strength. I was in a very difficult and delicate situation before the US Open, for the previous months, where I struggled to understand what was happening. But at a certain point I said to myself: no Jannik, in the end it’s all quite irrelevant, because this sport can give you satisfaction and it can also get you down morally, but in the end I’m fine. Before playing in New York it was difficult first of all because I couldn’t open up to many people. It was a very complicated period because I didn’t know how I had to behave, personally, I didn’t know what would come out, I didn’t know what would happen with the team”.
“As a person I have never changed, success hasn’t changed me and it hasn’t changed how I treat the people in front of me, the ones I meet. What changes is that I have less free time. Because I am a person who dedicates all his time to work. So it depends on me. If I want to go home tomorrow I can go, but I don't want to because my career began when I left home at 13 and a half. Now I'm 23 and I've reached the point I've always dreamed of: becoming number one. It's right now that you have to continue working and improving, because there are all the players who want to chase you. I will play another 15 years, let's hope my body holds up. People think that 15 years is a long time, but that's not the case because today I was saying to myself: This year has gone by really fast. We are trying to make all the choices to continue playing as long as possible, but we can't waste time either because it's a good balance of improvement, work, desire to win, having the people you want around you and who can help you".