Sinner keeps rolling in Monte Carlo

Jannik Sinner opened the clay season by beating Alexander Zverev 6-1, 6-4 in the Monte Carlo semifinals on April 11, and he did it without facing a single break point. It is Sinner’s first Monte Carlo final after semifinal exits there in 2023 and 2024. (atptour.com) That result put him in the final of the first three Association of Tennis Professionals Masters 1000 events of 2026: Indian Wells in March, Miami in late March, and Monte Carlo in April. The Association of Tennis Professionals says only Roger Federer in 2006, Rafael Nadal in 2011, Novak Djokovic in 2015, and now Sinner have done that. (atptour.com) The run started on hard courts, where Sinner won Indian Wells by beating Daniil Medvedev 7-6, 7-6 in the final. That title completed Sinner’s set of all six hard-court Masters 1000 trophies and gave him 100 career Masters 1000 match wins, both firsts for an Italian man. (atptour.com) A week later in Miami, Sinner beat Jiri Lehecka 6-4, 6-4 to finish the “Sunshine Double,” which means winning Indian Wells and Miami in the same season. The Association of Tennis Professionals says he became the eighth man to pull that off and the first since Roger Federer in 2017. (apnews.com) (atptour.com) What makes Monte Carlo stand out is that the surface changed and the draw did not soften. Sinner’s route in Monaco ran through Ugo Humbert, Tomas Machac, Felix Auger-Aliassime, and then Zverev, with Machac taking the first Masters 1000 set off him since Paris in November 2025 before Sinner still closed in three. (atptour.com) (tennismajors.com) (atptour.com) That dropped set mattered because Sinner had been steamrolling this level of event. Reuters reported that his win over Machac ended a streak of 37 straight sets won at Masters 1000 tournaments, a run that stretched back to Shanghai in October 2025. (straitstimes.com) He still reached the final with his Masters 1000 winning streak intact. The Association of Tennis Professionals put that streak at 21 matches after the Zverev semifinal, covering titles in Paris, Indian Wells, and Miami before this Monte Carlo run. (atptour.com) The Zverev match also showed how lopsided that rivalry has become. The Association of Tennis Professionals said Sinner’s Monte Carlo win gave him a 5-0 lead in their Lexus head-to-head series, and it was their third meeting in three Masters 1000 events this spring after Indian Wells and Miami. (atptour.com) Monte Carlo is the first big stop of the European clay swing, and Sinner had never gone past the semifinals there before this week. Now he has carried hard-court dominance onto clay in one jump, which is exactly the test players face before Madrid, Rome, and Roland Garros. (atptour.com 1) (atptour.com 2) His final is set against Carlos Alcaraz, who beat Monaco’s Valentin Vacherot in the other semifinal. That means the first three Masters 1000 finals of 2026 end with Sinner arriving at all of them, and Monte Carlo adds the extra wrinkle of a surface change right before the sport’s biggest clay events. (atptour.com 1) (atptour.com 2)