After two decades, the Federer/Nadal/Djokovic dynasty is ending. Another may well be rising.
It’s the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells in March last year, midway
between Jannik Sinner’s maiden major championship win at the Australian Open and Carlos Alcaraz’s triumph at the French Open. Here, they’re playing a semi, and it’s finely balanced.
Alcaraz’s serve from the deuce court fizzes high to Sinner’s left. It’s all he can do to get a backhand on it, and he has to spin blindly away from the court to recover his position. Alcaraz has stolen up to the net and chops off a drop shot. You can hear the click of Sinner’s racquet on the ground as he scrambles to reach it in such a nick of time that a commentator thinks it might be a double bounce, but it’s not.
The ball floats across and past Alcaraz, who has to reach a little behind himself with his forehand to send the ball back down the line. Though stranded, Sinner is quick enough to track back to the edge of the service box to produce his own backhand down the line. Alcaraz cuts it off at the pass, aiming his forehand volley on such an acute angle across the court that it looks bound to hit the foot of the umpire’s chair.
They’re no longer playing the court in its traditional orientation, between baselines, but laterally, from net post to net post. Sinner somehow reaches the ball just outside the doubles alley and wraps enough of his racquet around it to send his own forehand back across the net and the court at an equally improbable angle.
Alcaraz throws himself at it and catches it a metre outside the court. He’s thinking to poke it deep to Sinner’s backhand, but cannot quite tame it and it drifts just wide of the sideline.
The crowd erupts and the players look back over their shoulders, exchanging grins. If it was the only point you saw for the night, you might think you had your money’s worth.
Sporting immortality has a short half-life. The Federer-Nadal-Djokovic dynasty that ruled men’s tennis for the first quarter of the 21st century has not yet officially come to an end, not while Djokovic still has rarefied breath in him (and a 25th major in his head), yet their usurpers are shaping as an even greater dominion. It already has a catchy shortform: Sincaraz.
Yes, it’s been said before, as a long line of pretenders came and saw but failed to conquer. At last, the effluxion of time has done its work. Last year looked and felt like a watershed. For the first time in 20 years, the immortal trio won none of the four majors. Instead, Alcaraz and Sinner split them.
Jannik Sinner playing against Carlos Alcaraz in last year’s BNP Paribas Open semi-final.Credit: Getty Images
But it’s not just that. Later in 2024, former No. 1 Mats Wilander said out loud what many were beginning to think. “I hope Roger, Novak and Rafa are not listening,” Wilander said on the Tennis365 website, “but in terms of level, when Sinner and Alcaraz are at their best, there is no way anyone has ever played better tennis, that the tennis ball has done more, different, complicated, difficult things than the ball is doing between Sinner and Alcaraz.”
Current top-10er Taylor Fritz, who lost to Sinner in the US Open final and again in the ATP Finals, agrees. “They play these lateral baseline points,” he said. “Nadal and Novak have these long points, corner to corner, but when Sinner and Alcaraz do it, I swear they’re the same, but hitting the ball 10 miles per hour faster. It’s crazy.”
Writing in The New Yorker early last year, journalist Gerald Marzorati fleshed out the idea that here was tennis on a previously unattainable plane. “It is, first of all, breakneck tennis,” he wrote. “No ball that one of them gets to and strikes on the fly can be safely presumed to be beyond the reach of the dashing other. Their ground strokes are beyond what only yesterday was considered powerful. They hit forehands on the run harder than many players can from the middle of the court. On it goes, tennis as an all-court high-wire act.”
Lecturing in Melbourne a few years ago, former England cricket captain and psychotherapist Mike Brearley explained that rivalry was a much more subtle entity than mere opposition. The word’s Latin root, he said, meant “sharing the same river bank”. Rivals needed one another for validation, and each needed the other at their best so that there could be neither excuse nor cavil. “Opponents are co-creators of excellence and integrity,” Brearley said. “There is a unity of shared striving as well as a duality of opposition.”
For Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, it was a triality. For 20 years, they dominated tennis, winning 66 of 82 majors. If they were only two, it might have perhaps become tiresome, but three made it intriguing. They were off-set; Federer is six years older than Djokovic, which meant the internal dynamics of the troika shifted over time.
There is less than two years between Alcaraz and Sinner. Alcaraz is the youngest player ever to reach No. 1 in the ATP rankings and the youngest male to win on all three surfaces. At 21, he’s already won more majors than any player other than the holy trinity in the past two decades. He and Sinner have won six of the past nine slams; the other three fell to Djokovic.
Sinner has arrived in a recent, irresistible rush, winning his first two majors last year and beating Alcaraz in a high-profile exhibition in Saudi Arabia before winning the ATP Finals in Turin and, as part of the Italian team, the Davis Cup for the second year in a row in Spain. Their rivalry is nascent. They’ve played each other just 10 times at ATP level and not yet in a major final. The untouchables played one another 150 times, including in 23 major finals.
Carlos Alcaraz, seen as “the outlier” by AO boss Paul McNamee, went on to win last year’s BNP Paribas Open. Credit: Getty Images
Precocity is precious. Injury, form lapses, burnout, scandal, an interloper; all could betray them and diminish their rivalry. Hanging over Sinner is a drug cloud, now awaiting a hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, that could yet taint the whole narrative. Sinner’s initial provisional suspension was overturned and he maintains his innocence, asking in a statement what could be gained by putting the same facts and documentation before a different set of three judges. But the cloud will not have lifted by the time the Australian Open begins.
‘Alcaraz uses the angles. He’s playing chess the whole time. For me, he plays the best style of tennis I’ve ever seen.’
Former AO boss Paul McNamee
Not everyone buys into the idea of Sincaraz as tennis’s unassailable new dynasty. Others have them on lay-by, until the time comes. Others again wonder if Alcaraz might yet steal the whole show for himself. Former player and AO boss Paul McNamee, now a coach, is one.
“The way the game is played now, Alcaraz is a contrast with anybody. He’s the outlier,” McNamee says. “His game is so unique. Jannik is in some ways a clone of Djokovic. He’s a massively good ball-striker, but he’s quite linear. He does it incredibly well. Alcaraz uses the angles. He’s playing chess the whole time. For me, he plays the best style of tennis I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone play that sort of tennis anywhere in my life. It’s breathtaking.” McNamee adds one other qualification about a new duumvirate. “I don’t think Novak is done yet,” he says. “I think he’ll get a 25th [major].”
Before Craig Tiley became CEO of Tennis Australia, he was an American college player and coach and captain of South Africa’s Davis Cup team. He remembers how everyone thought that Connors/McEnroe/Borg would be irreplaceable as an act, and later Sampras/Agassi; on the women’s side it was Evert/Navratilova and subsequently the Williams sisters. “I’ve been around tennis long enough to know there’s always another on the horizon,” he says.
The competition now is wider, deeper and flatter, and is growing. All of the top 10 are capable of at least disruption. Others could yet spoil the party – or add to it. “And they’ve still got to get past Novak, obviously,” Tiley says. “He beats anyone, any day, on any surface.” So in ABC political commentator Antony Green parlance, he’s got Sincaraz as a “watch”.
“I think Roger, Rafa and Novak at their greatest hold the title,” Tiley adds. “When they played each other, the tennis was phenomenal. But that was when they’d won 10 and 15 slams, not at the beginning.
“Carlos and Jannik are at the beginning. I do see a scenario where they continue to get challenged, raise their game, improve. They’ve only won a few slams each. You’d expect them to get 10, 15 more. Once they do, you’ll probably see the best tennis we’ve ever seen.”
Tennis is replete with analysts who make a living by breaking down the game atomically. One is Nikola Aracic, a Croatian former low-level player, coach and podcaster. When he heard Wilander’s awestruck estimation of Alcaraz and Sinner as the best yet, he figuratively arched his back. “It’s unfair to them, but it’s also not true,” he said on his Intuitive Tennis podcast. “The thing I’ve noticed with both Sinner and Alcaraz is that there are a lot of ups and downs.”
Aracic cited Alcaraz’s victory over Alexander Zverev in last year’s French Open final. “It was incredibly entertaining, but was it a match of the utmost quality possible, something we’ve seen so many times from the big three? No,” he said. “I thought that if Alcaraz played prime Djokovic on that particular day, or prime Nadal, he would not have won that match.” Aracic also noted the Olympic final last year. “A 37-year-old Djokovic outsteadies Alcaraz in his prime and takes the gold medal from him,” he said. “The point I’m trying to make is that while the level of Alcaraz and Sinner is absolutely insane, when compared to the three greatest players in the history of
tennis, they’re not as consistent.”
Aracic said Sinner’s wins over Daniil Medvedev in the Australian Open final and Taylor Fritz in the US Open final last year were punctuated by long lulls. “Other players would have exploited that, especially the big three in their prime,” he said.
The 2014 US Open winner and coach, Marin Cilic, has the same reservations. “Novak and Rafa, if you weren’t with them from the first ball of the match, you could immediately go home and say goodbye to everyone,” he said while watching an ATP 250 tournament in Belgrade. “If I compare, it is clear that Jannik and Carlos are not yet at the same level of mental preparation as Novak, Roger and Rafa were.”
Safe in their revered place in history, the big three have only platitudes to offer their heirs and successors. They won the past, and will leave the present and future to look after themselves. “It’s not a moment to compare eras,” the newly retired Nadal said recently. “[Finishing] is part of the sports career of everyone.
“Now a new generation is coming. We need to let them create their own rivalries and their own stories. They don’t need the comparisons with us. Let’s see at the end of their careers.”
Federer, Nadal and Djokovic were antagonists who became friends and nearly soulmates as their rivalry grew. In the early days, the rough edges sometimes showed. Later, it was as if even they were full of wonder at what they were creating together and were careful not to do or say anything to cheapen it. The effect was ennobling.
A generation later, consciously or otherwise, Sinner and Alcaraz seem to be walking in their footsteps. “We understand each other,” said Sinner after beating Alcaraz in Saudi Arabia. “I would say we are very good friends. Not the best out of the best. But we like to share every time when we go out on court. We try to enjoy.”
Through competition, their connection grows. It’s sport’s animating paradox, most starkly seen in tennis because it is so intensely personal. “As Carlos said, we try to push ourselves to the limit,” said Sinner. “I wake up in the morning trying to understand the ways to beat him.”
Alcaraz reciprocated. “I’ll try to do my best every day during the years,” he said. “Hopefully this makes the rivalry better and better over the years. I want to say I’m grateful to have him around on the tour. Thanks to him, I push myself to the limit. It’s a pleasure every time I share the court with him. Sometimes it’s tough to find the joy, but it’s great every time I face him.”
Defeat spurs a drive to be better when they next meet, in the certain knowledge that there will be many more meetings.
“I reckon that’s what the past big three have done in a similar way,” said Alcaraz. “We try to do the same, no?”
Yes, please.
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