Sinner’s rare streak

Jannik Sinner has spent the last four weeks turning the biggest regular-season events in men’s tennis into the same story over and over: he reached the finals in Indian Wells, Miami, and now Monte-Carlo, after beating Alexander Zverev 6-1, 6-4 in the semifinal on April 11. The ATP Tour says he is the first man since 2015 to make the final at the season’s first three Masters 1000 tournaments. (atptour.com) Those tournaments sit one rung below the four Grand Slam events, and they are where the tour’s best players usually start separating from everyone else. The Masters 1000 series began in 1990, and there are only nine of these events on the calendar. (atptour.com) Sinner’s run started in California on March 15, when he beat Daniil Medvedev in the Indian Wells final without dropping a set all tournament. That win gave him all six hard-court Masters 1000 titles, making him the youngest man to complete that set. (atptour.com, tennis.com) Two weeks later in Florida, he beat Jiri Lehecka 6-4, 6-4 to win Miami and complete the Sunshine Double, which means winning Indian Wells and Miami in the same season. The ATP Tour says he was the first man since Roger Federer in 2017 to do that, and the first ever to do it without losing a set across both events. (atptour.com) Then he carried that hard-court form straight onto clay, which usually asks for a different kind of tennis because points last longer and the ball sits up higher after the bounce. In Monte-Carlo, he opened with a 6-3, 6-0 win over Ugo Humbert just nine days after Miami. (atptour.com) The streak almost cracked against Tomas Machac in the third round, when Sinner lost a set at Masters 1000 level for the first time since Shanghai in October. He still won 6-1, 6-7, 6-3, and the ATP Tour said his run of consecutive sets won at that level had reached 37 before Machac stopped it. (atptour.com, atptour.com) By the quarterfinals, the streak had moved from neat to historic. His win over Felix Auger-Aliassime gave him 20 straight Masters 1000 match wins, which the ATP Tour said put him alongside Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal as the only men to hit that mark. (atptour.com) The semifinal against Zverev showed why this run feels heavier than a normal hot streak. Sinner has now beaten Zverev eight straight times at tour level, and this one sent him to his first Monte-Carlo final, which means he has now reached the title match at eight different Masters 1000 events. (atptour.com, tennis.com) There is one wrinkle in the story: Sinner is doing all this as the world No. 2, not No. 1. The ATP Tour’s live rankings page listed Carlos Alcaraz at No. 1 with 13,590 points and Sinner at No. 2 with 12,400 points going into the Monte-Carlo final, so this streak has also become a direct chase at the top of the sport. (atptour.com) That chase now gets the cleanest possible ending for this week, because Monte-Carlo set up a final between Sinner and Alcaraz on Sunday, April 12, at 3 p.m. local time. After three straight Masters 1000 finals, Sinner is no longer just stacking wins; he is dragging every big tournament toward the same collision. (atptour.com)