Jannik Sinner's Wimbledon win a victory for nerve, stamina and very effective lawyers
Contrast this lenient treatment of a superstar with the fate that members of the rank-and-file have endured. In 2022, Britain's Tara Moore recorded positive tests for boldenone and nandrolone. While the International Tennis Integrity Unit eventually exonerated her, agreeing with her testimony that she had eaten the meat of steroid-dosed cattle, this verdict did not arrive until after 19 months of professional and reputational ruin. 'It's going to take more than 19 months to rebuild, repair and recuperate,' she lamented.
This is the point that truly sticks in the craw with Sinner: that while his career has not been derailed in the slightest, lesser mortals who have committed similar transgressions have had their livelihoods destroyed. A champion with an asterisk? That is a bold claim. But there is no doubt that his name, newly inscribed on his sport's most prestigious honours board, comes with a distressing amount of baggage. This was a victory for nerve, stamina – and some very effective lawyers.
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The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Sinner's Wimbledon focus was unblinking on every point – Alcaraz is playing catch-up
With his hopes of a third consecutive Wimbledon title fading desperately with every point, Carlos Alcaraz sat in his chair on Centre Court after conceding the third set of his final with Jannik Sinner and unloaded his thoughts on his team: 'From the back of the court, he is much better than me. Much better than me! Much [better]! It's like this,' Alcaraz said, gesturing with his hands to demonstrate the vast gap between his greatest rival and himself. His assessment was not wrong. From a set down, Sinner put together a supreme performance to overturn five consecutive defeats against Alcaraz and win his first Wimbledon title, avenging the most difficult loss in his career – his French Open final defeat by Alcaraz in June – at the earliest opportunity. No one in the world strikes the ball with anything close to the destructive power, cleanliness, consistency that the Italian employs to dominate on the court and he used his incessant aggression to constantly rob time from his opponent, making it so difficult for him to impose his own varied game. Perhaps most notably, he pulled off the victory without making any fundamental changes to his approach. He continued to play the relentless brand of attacking tennis that has brought him success, smothering Alcaraz from the baseline. This time, he simply served far better in the decisive moments and he remained bold with his shot-making deep in the fourth set. The intensity, quality and unblinking focus Sinner brings on every single point was too much for Alcaraz, who this time could not find a miraculous pathway back into the match. Sinner has spent the past 18 months dominating all others. Before the final he had compiled a record of 81 wins and two defeats against players other than Alcaraz since November 2023, and four losses out of four against the Spanish player during that period. This result shifts the dynamics of their rivalry – now Alcaraz must keep up. Peaking spectacularly in the big moments is not enough. Beating Sinner in best-of-five-set matches now requires consistent, steady excellence across the course of a match with few letdowns. Things will only become more challenging. After achieving such a monumental result on one of Alcaraz's favourite surfaces, Sinner will return to his preferred hard courts more confident than ever before. In the early hours of Monday morning, after Sinner had left Centre Court, drunk champagne with his loved ones and then endured the two-hour plus media blitz reserved for all major champions, he was escorted to the five-star hotel Raffles London at the OWO for the annual Wimbledon champions dinner. By the time Sinner, 24 in August, made his appearance, well after midnight, he was in a slightly different mental state compared to the unrelenting focus he exuded on the court. 'We were drinking quite a lot in the last hours,' he said, smiling. 'A bit turning, the head, but it's all good.' Once an actual ball with the famed tradition of the men's and women's champions sharing the first dance of the night, Wimbledon's celebratory event is a low-key dinner these days and the two champions were interviewed by the former British No 1 Laura Robson. Over the past two years, however, the event has nodded to its history by orchestrating a dance on stage. After 1am on Monday, a smiling Iga Swiatek and Sinner could be found dancing awkwardly together to Feel Iit Still by Portugal. The Man. Towards the end of her interview, Swiatek was asked if she had ever considered offering up one solitary game to her opponent Amanda Anisimova, whom she thrashed in their final: 'I didn't,' she said after a long pause. 'But I think any athlete would understand that.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Swiatek's 6-0, 6-0 win was a historic moment in the sport. However, it was also a simple reminder of the Pole's singular dominance. She has She has demolished almost every prominent player on the tour at some point and she had already inflicted a double bagel on a far more distinguished opponent in a significant final, doing the same to Karolina Pliskova, the former world No 1 who was ranked No 9, , in the 2021 Italian Open. A beatdown is always on the cards when Swiatek is in full flow. In comparison to the relief she felt after living up to expectations by maintaining her dominance on clay with three consecutive French Open titles, her sheer joy after winning Wimbledon, a title she never really expected to win, has been striking. This result has further allowed her to understand her potential and will almost certainly spur her on to even greater successes. Now one Australian Open away from the career grand slam, it is hard to imagine that Swiatek will not end her playing days having captured every major title possible.
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
France signals willingness to discuss reparations for colonial massacres in Niger
More than a century after its troops burned villages and looted cultural artefacts in the quest to include Niger in its west African colonial portfolio, France has signalled willingness over possible restitution, but is yet to acknowledge responsibility. 'France remains open to bilateral dialogue with the Nigerien authorities, as well as to any collaboration concerning provenance research or patrimonial cooperation,' the office of France's permanent representative to the UN wrote in a document seen by the Guardian. The 19 June response was given to a letter dated two months earlier from a UN special rapporteur working on a complaint by four Nigerien communities representing descendants of victims of the 1899 Mission Afrique Centrale (MAC), one of the most violent colonial campaigns in Africa. 'Although France was aware of the atrocities at the time, no MAC officer has ever been held responsible for these crimes … France has not conducted any official inquiry or acknowledged the horrors inflicted on the communities affected,' wrote Bernard Duhaime, a professor of international law at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the UN special rapporteur working on the case. In 1899, French officers led by the captains Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine marched tirailleurs – as the African soldiers under their command were known – through communities in present-day Niger. They killed thousands of unarmed people and looted supplies, terrorising local people into compliance. The next year, Niger became officially absorbed into French west Africa. 'I have come to establish an empire,' Voulet reportedly said, according to the American historian Matthew G Stanard in his 2009 book The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa. 'If I must kill, I will kill. If I must burn, I will burn. Every means is justifiable.' In Birni-N'Konni alone, an estimated 400 people were massacred in a day. Entire villages along the mission's path – including Tibiri, Zinder and smaller communities – were burned and looted, with corpses hung at their entrances. Some survivors fled to neighbouring Nigeria and never returned. When Paris dispatched Col Jean-François Klobb to replace Voulet in July that year and end the bloodletting, the superior officer was shot to death by soldiers acting on the latter's instructions. In recent years, France has begun to engage with its historical wrongdoings in Africa even as anti-French sentiments soar across the continent. In 2021, President Emmanuel Macron admitted France's responsibility in the Rwandan genocide. A year later, Paris acknowledged the 1945 massacre of tens of thousands of Algerian civilians in Sétif. In May 2023, it issued a formal apology for the brutal repression of the 1947 Malagasy uprising. Still, there has been a reluctance to acknowledge the Voulet-Chanoine mission, which is largely absent from French schoolbooks and only faintly remembered in Niger's national curriculum. Instead, there was a bureaucratic cover-up and accounts of survivors' descendants have been weak or subdued, often due to decades of silence and trauma. The case relied on documents written by Nigerien historians and limited archival materials including reports by Voulet himself, said the British-Senegalese lawyer Jelia Sané who worked with the affected communities. The communities are now requesting access to official archives in order to reveal the true extent of the atrocities. 'The graves of some of the [French] troops are still in those communities today, even though the victims were never memorialised,' said Sané. For Hosseini Tahirou Amadou, a history and geography teacher in Dioundiou who began the campaign in 2014, acknowledging the atrocities would be the first step in the right direction. 'After this recognition, now we can move on to the next step, which is reparation,' he said. 'During these crimes, precious objects linked to our historywere stolen to France. We need their return.' In its response to the UN special rapporteur, the French government neither denied nor admitted the atrocities, but cited the principle of non-retroactivity of international law, saying any treaties it was deemed to have contravened were ratified long after the incident occurred. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion 'It is well established that for a violation of international law to give rise to responsibility, the obligation must be in force vis-a-vis the state and the violation must occur at the time the act is committed,' the letter read. Paris also said it was yet to receive restitution requests concerning MAC-related looted artefacts or human remains from Nigerien authorities. 'They don't dispute [the incident] overtly or implicitly … they don't really engage with the facts,' Sané said. 'However, it's not really possible for them to dispute these things because they investigated a number of these allegations themselves.' The case findings will be included in the next UN human rights report and presented to the general assembly in October. Historians say it could promote continent-wide conversations on reparations. The African Union has labelled 2025 the Year of Reparations, after a decade of sustained lobbying by four Nigerien communities that was accelerated in 2021 after the release of the BBC documentary African Apocalypse, which was screened in French and Hausa around the country. In 2021, Germany formally acknowledged colonial-era genocides in Namibia and pledged €1.1bn over 30 years in aid as a form of symbolic reconciliation, though it stopped short of calling it reparation or compensation. The matter of monetary compensation is yet to be addressed by the communities as the exact number of victims remains unknown. However, the historian and former higher education minister Mamoudou Djibo is adamant that things are not at that stage yet. 'We are not beggars,' he said. 'Our demand for reparation is not systematically that we are given money but that first of all, France recognises that it has committed crimes against humanity. When this is recognised, we will be ready to dialogue.' In its letter, France said its schools taught the history of colonisation and that 'the level of curriculum-writing leaves great pedagogical freedom to teachers to address these themes', but did not clarify if the Voulet-Chanoine mission was included. Back in Niger, Amadou is waiting for the crimes to be taught in French schools and for what he considers the bare minimum – a memorial to the massacre. 'These communities deserve to have monuments, because these are things that should not be forgotten,' he said.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Jannik Sinner is a son of lost Europe
The clue is in his appearance. The sandy-haired, blue-eyed, 6ft 2in star Jannik Sinner is the world's No. 1 tennis champion and has just clinched his – and Italy's – first win in the world-famous Wimbledon tournament. Sinner, the new hero of tennis after his victory over the previous reigning Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz, may hold an Italian passport, but he doesn't look or sound like a typical Italian. In fact, Sinner is a member of one of the many ethnic and linguistic minorities who populate the supposedly united countries of the European Union. The 24-year-old was born and brought up in the Alpine province of South Tyrol – known to Italian Italians as the Alto Adige – 70 per cent of whose inhabitants are, like Sinner, German-speaking ethnic Austrians. South Tyrol is divided by the Alps. The northern part of the province is in Austria, but the south has been part of Italy since it was awarded to the country after Austria's defeat in the first world war. Though it is peaceful today, that has not always been the case. In the 1930s and 1940s, when Hitler ruled Germany and absorbed his native Austria into the Third Reich, most German-speaking inhabitants of South Tyrol preferred life with their racial and linguistic brothers – even under the Nazis – to the oppressive rule of Mussolini's fascist Italy. Many trekked over the mountains to join the Reich. They only returned to their homeland after the second world war ended in the Nazis' defeat. But they were still unhappy with Rome's rule, and during the 1950s and 1960s, German-speaking separatists saught independence from Italy, mounted a bombing campaign which, although aimed at Italian infrastructure, also cost several lives. Modern Italy has blunted such terrorism by granting a large degree of autonomy to South Tyrol, where public signs and even rail tickets are printed in both languages – Italian and German. Although Sinner is claimed as an Italian hero by Rome and has even hugged Italy's diminutive Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in public, many Italians regard him as not really one of their own. Italy only became a united nation in the 1870s, and even today regional loyalties are stronger than national bonds. Romans are Romans, Sicilians Sicilians, and Venetians are Venetians before they are Italians. The same rule applies with even greater force when you don't speak the same language as your compatriots. Italy is not alone in containing restive ethnic and linguistic minorities. France has its Celtic Brittany, and nationalist Bretons have also occasionally launched bombing campaigns, while Spain – the country of Sinner's defeated rival Alcaraz – has the Basques and the Catalans. The Basques, who speak an ancient and difficult language, have inhabited their corner of north-west Spain since before the Spanish-speaking Iberians got there. Proud of their distinct heritage, they spearheaded violent opposition to the Franco dictatorship after their former capital Guernica was destroyed by German bombers in the Spanish civil war. Terrorism continued even after democracy returned to Spain following Franco's death in 1975. The current Spanish socialist government owes its very survival to a controversial deal with the Catalan separatists of north-eastern Spain, who have long mounted their own campaign for independence. These minorities, in the major countries of western Europe, have often asserted their claims to autonomy or outright independence by force of arms. By doing so, that have given the lie to the EU's bland claim that Europeans are one happy united family in a single continent where such differences are an unfortunate relic of a forgotten and discredited past. As a former resident of Austria with a Viennese son, I am vividly aware of how deeply Europe's varied peoples value their rich and profoundly different identities. Jannik Sinner is a supremely talented sportsman first and foremost, but his very existence gives a face to his own beautiful and neglected part of the world – and may also draw attention to Europe's other forgotten minorities.
