Italy's Jannik Sinner wins first Wimbledon title – DW – 07/13/2025
Italy's Jannik Sinner sealed his first victory in the men's singles tennis final at Wimbledon on Sunday against Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz.
Sinner beat Alcaraz in all four sets (4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4).
The 23-year-old is already the first Italian to be ranked as the world's No. 1 in men's singles by the ATP.
Sunday's match came just five weeks after the pair played an epic match to determine the French Open champion, which Alcaraz won.
Sinner's Grand Slam titles include the Australian Open and French Open in 2025, but until Sunday, he had yet to claim the Wimbledon crown.
His best prior Wimbledon results were semifinals in 2023 and 2024.
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A brief history of queerness – DW – 07/14/2025
Was the Mona Lisa based on Leonardo da Vinci's male lover? Queer identities aren't just a modern phenomenon. Here's a look at LGBTQ+ history through time. In 1476, a young Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was investigated by the Florentine moral authorities. Someone had anonymously accused him of fornicating with a 17-year-old sex worker. But the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence. Literary historian Dino Heicker, author of the 2025 German-language book "World History of Queerness", says there are contemporary sources proving that Leonardo loved men. He was particularly taken with an apprentice 28 years younger than him named Gian Giacomo Caprotti, also known as as "Salaj" (or "little devil"). And they lived together for many years. A few years ago, Italian art historians thought they had found proof that the world-famous Mona Lisa was not Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine merchant — but Caprotti instead. He modeled for da Vinci several times and researchers say that the resemblance is unmistakable. Additionally, the letters L and S (for Leonardo and Salaj) can even be seen in the eyes of the Mona Lisa, as well as the endearing words, "mon salaj" (or "My Salaj"), which may also be a rough anagram of "Mona Lisa." But the Louvre Museum, where the world-famous painting hangs, isn't convinced of the theory. Is it true? Da Vinci and his companion took this secret to their graves. In 1550, Leonardo's first biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote that the painter took "peculiar pleasure" in the beautiful boy — where the word "peculiar" functioned as a euphemism for da Vinci's queerness. "When a majority defines what is normal and abnormal and declares a binary gender model to be the norm, this creates a difficult environment for minorities who feel differently," says Dino Heicker. In his book, he states the draconian punishments were sometimes inflicted upon queer, non-binary or transgender people who indulged in what was referred to at the time as "unnatural" lifestyles. They were put in chains, stoned, castrated or ended up burned at the stake. Those meting the punishment used the Bible to legitimize their persecution of queer people, especially the story of Sodom and Gomorrah — the cities destroyed by God because of what the book classifies as "sinful" behavior. The term "sodomy" has also been used as a synonym for homosexuality. This story "provided the blueprint for centuries of stigmatization toward other kinds of people." In 1512, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa ordered his dogs to maul Indigenous people in America, accusing them of having committed "the horrible sin of sodomy." On the other hand, there were also societies in which many forms of queerness were generally accepted. For example, during antiquity, it was common for men to have a male lover in addition to their wives. The Roman emperor Hadrian was so heartbroken by the death of his beloved Antinous that he had him posthumously declared as a god, and erected numerous statues and places of worship to honor the beautiful youth. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) once said that lawmakers on the island of Crete came up with something very special to celebrate new births: pederasty, or "boy love," when an older man took a young man into his home to train him sexually. "Sexual favors were expected from the younger man, but this was not viewed disparagingly by society," explains Dino Heicker. At the same time, love between women was also commonplace. On the island of Lesbos, the poet Sappho paid homage to the beauty of the female form in her verses. 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He railed against fornication, which he saw spreading even in monasteries: "The befouling cancer of sodomy," he wrote, "is, in fact, spreading so through the clergy or rather, like a savage beast, is raging with such shameless abandon through the flock of Christ." Sodomy, he was convinced, was the result of diabolical whispers. Among the samurai warriors in Japan and at the Chinese imperial court, there was a more relaxed attitude towards queerness; same-sex love was common among men. In 1549, the Jesuit priest Francisco de Xavier noted: "The Buddhist priests constantly commit crimes against nature and do not even deny it. They openly admit it." In later centuries and modern times, there were various LGBTQ+ figures — including among royalty. Heicker's book lists among others the Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), African-American playwright James Baldwin (1924-1987) and also Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the women who retreated to a remote valley in Wales around 1780 and who were eyed suspiciously as the "Ladies of Llangollen." They were all just trying to find happiness. The English landowner Anne Lister (1791-1840) left behind a set of diaries that was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2011. "In these 26 volumes, she writes in detail about lesbian sex and her relationship with women," explains Heicker. Lister had developed a secret code so that no uninitiated person could read her confessions, which were not deciphered until 1930. In her village, she was often referred to as "Gentleman Jack" but was largely left undisturbed. Lister's writing had a significant influence on the direction of British gender studies and women's history. From the Mahus on Tahiti to the Muxes of the Zapotec people in Mexico, the Hijras in India and the North American Lhamanas of the Zuñi: for thousands of years, across cultures, people have felt they belonged to the third gender, identifying neither as men nor as women. "There was much greater diversity than the narrow, binary gender model would have us think today," says Heicker. "The Zuñi, for example, do not assume that gender is innate, rather they see it as a social construct." In Germany today, the third gender is referred to as "diverse." "Queer people, especially in Germany, have had to fight for freedoms previous generations could only dream of," says Heicker. "In 1994, Paragraph 175() was finally removed from the penal code. Same-sex marriage has been legalized, and sexual discrimination is now an offence. On the other hand, and here comes the big but: these achievements must continuously also be protected, especially in the face of attempts to turn back the clock."
Int'l Business Times
20 hours ago
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Sinner Downs Alcaraz To Win First Wimbledon
Jannik Sinner downed Carlos Alcaraz 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4 on Sunday to win his first Wimbledon title, gaining sweet revenge for his painful defeat in the French Open final. The world number one is the first Italian to win at the All England Club and now has four Grand Slams to his name at the age of 23. The tennis world has been captivated by the emergence of the new rivalry to follow the storied "Big Three" era of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Sinner and two-time defending Wimbledon champion Alcaraz have now shared the past seven Grand Slam titles between them, with the Italian winning four of those. Defeat in Paris last month was a bitter blow for Sinner, who led by two sets and squandered three match points in the final. Prior to Sunday's victory, he had lost five consecutive times against Alcaraz, including the final of the Italian Open in the first tournament he played after returning from a three-month doping ban. But this time he turned the tables in impressive fashion. Both players were solid on serve until the fifth game, when Alcaraz sprayed a forehand long to hand Sinner the first break of the match. But the Spaniard levelled at 4-4 to the delight of the Centre Court crowd, which included Prince William and his wife Catherine, Princess of Wales. Sinner double-faulted to hand Alcaraz a second set point. The Italian laced a searing forehand down the line but Alcaraz produced a magical backhand winner, pointing his finger to his ear as the crowd rose to their feet. Sinner, still wearing a protective white sleeve after his nasty fall in his fourth-round match against Grigor Dimitrov, broke in the first game of the second set and led 3-1 after play was briefly halted by a flying cork. Sinner shook his racquet after winning the first point as he served for the set and was rewarded with cheers before levelling the match with a whipped forehand. The third set was a tense affair that went with serve until the ninth game when Sinner broke as Alcaraz slipped over on the baseline and he went 2-1 up. The momentum was now all with Sinner and he broke again in the third game of the fourth set to take the match by the scruff of the neck. The chance was always there that Alcaraz would produce the magic he found at Roland Garros but Sinner stayed ice-cool. The Spaniard had two break points to hit back in the eighth game but Sinner shut the door impressively. Sinner stepped up to serve for the championship amid a cacophony of noise, staying focused to seal the deal on his second championship point. The Italian cruised through the first three rounds at Wimbledon, losing just 17 games -- equalling an Open era record set in 1972. But he got lucky in the fourth round against inspired Bulgarian 19th seed Dimitrov, who was leading by two sets when he suffered an injury that forced him to quit. Sinner got back into the groove against 10th seed Ben Shelton in the quarter-finals before demolishing seven-time champion Djokovic in the last four. Alcaraz had been aiming to become just the fifth man in the Open era to win three consecutive Wimbledons after Bjorn Borg, Pete Sampras, Federer and Djokovic.
DW
20 hours ago
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Italy's Jannik Sinner wins first Wimbledon title – DW – 07/13/2025
The gripping final at Centre Court was watched by Prince William and Kate, the Princess of Wales, as well as a slew of Hollywood stars. Italy's Jannik Sinner sealed his first victory in the men's singles tennis final at Wimbledon on Sunday against Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz. Sinner beat Alcaraz in all four sets (4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4). The 23-year-old is already the first Italian to be ranked as the world's No. 1 in men's singles by the ATP. Sunday's match came just five weeks after the pair played an epic match to determine the French Open champion, which Alcaraz won. Sinner's Grand Slam titles include the Australian Open and French Open in 2025, but until Sunday, he had yet to claim the Wimbledon crown. His best prior Wimbledon results were semifinals in 2023 and 2024.
