‘Jack Draper will win big, big titles': Jannik Sinner on bromance with British No1

Telegraph

a day ago

Jannik Sinner was in a snoozy mood. He must have yawned three or four times while I was interviewing him, which does not say much for the originality of my questions.
But one subject sparked his interest. Asked about his friendship with Jack Draper – the latest British hero to enter the labyrinth of Wimbledon – Sinner perked up noticeably and leaned forward. From the beady look in his eye, he could have been preparing to return serve.
'You're lucky to have a player like him,' said Sinner, the top seed and world No 1. 'After Andy [Murray], they need someone big. He [Draper] is someone big, and he's someone who is going to stay there for a very, very long time.'
It was an unusually emphatic statement from Sinner, a low pulse-rate sort of fellow who is as understated as the young Bjorn Borg. But then his relationship with Draper is clearly heartfelt.
'One of the best friends I have on the tour,' he explained of Draper, a man he once taught to cook pasta during a moment of downtime on the Challenger circuit. 'We are quite similar in the way we make a lot of sacrifices to be the best we can.
'He came also, when I was banned. He came to Monaco to practise there and everything was great. But now things are … are a bit different, because, you know, he's No 4 in the world.'
'Aha,' I said, sensing a possible grey area in Sinner's neatly organised world. 'Does that mean you can't practise with him any more?'
'OK, it's harder to practise with him all the time,' Sinner acknowledged. 'You share less things on court, I guess. You don't want to show him much, you know, in the practice sessions. And he's not gonna show me the real tennis either. It is a bit complicated.
'But it doesn't mean that the friendship goes away completely. It's maybe the opposite. We talk about playing doubles in the future, and we grab dinner at times.
'Jack has grown so much,' Sinner concludes. 'Physically, he's strong. Mentally, he's very, very good. I truly believe he is going to win some big, big titles.'
Sinner's enthusiasm stems from a long association with Draper on the junior tour, as well as a shared sense of humour. A mutual friend explains that 'You don't see the real Jannik unless you really know him, but he's actually very funny in private and has a mickey-taking side that British people appreciate.'
Delving into the archives, Telegraph Sport found photographic evidence of this childhood connection. A group shot from the 2013 Nike Junior World Tour shows an 11-year-old Draper grinning broadly in the front row. Meanwhile Sinner stands in a patch of shadow, peering through a gap between two other boys, and rocking a bushy red mullet.
Their positioning in that photo feels deliberate. Sinner was a literal backmarker at the time, having only recently taken up tennis at the expense of skiing (a sport where he once finished second in the national giant-slalom for juniors). Progress was slow at first, and Draper recently described a teenage doubles encounter where 'we were saying 'Hit to him [Sinner, who was 15 at the time], because he's not the best player on the court!''
But as Sinner whizzed through the rankings like a snowboarder on a black run, the two men developed a close bond. 'We send each other messages in good moments, bad moments,' Draper explained last year. 'You're on the road, you're playing such a relentlessly intense sport, and we haven't got many friends. So to have the support of someone who's going through it themselves is really big.'
How very wholesome. For better or for worse, the relationships at the top of modern tennis seem positively collegiate these days, especially by comparison with the vitriolic rivalries of the 1980s and 90s. Remember McEnroe versus Connors? Or how about Sampras v Agassi?
During this week's interview, Sinner revealed that he had also sat down with Novak Djokovic after their initial competitive encounter – which came in Monaco in 2021 – to ask for a detailed assessment of his own game. As Sinner recalled, 'Novak said, 'Yeah, good player, but you were too predictable at times.''
It was generous of Djokovic to offer such assistance, and arguably he has paid the price, with Sinner now leading their head-to-head by five wins to four. As Sinner's coach Darren Cahill put it in a recent interview, 'it [the meeting] left a big impression on a young player. For Jannik, it was 'Let's start doing these changes.''
When you combine the unrivalled depth and pace of Sinner's bread-and-butter groundstrokes with the additional grace notes he has developed in recent years – touch volleys, drop shots and slices – you come away with a kind of tennis Terminator: a T1000 who just keeps rumbling forward, no matter what you throw at him.
There is only one other player who can stand up to such relentless bombardment. Three weeks ago, in the French Open final, Sinner's fast-twitch style collided with the wizardly improvisations of his greatest rival Carlos Alcaraz. They battled for almost six hours, and although Sinner lost, the margin of victory was just a single inch: the overlap between Alcaraz's forehand and the baseline on one of Sinner's three unconverted match points.
'I went home with my parents, with my friends,' said Sinner, when asked how he had processed that gigantic let-down. 'We had barbecues, played some ping pong, you know, trying to forget. But it was a very special match. The audience need rivals. It's part of history now, and I'm very happy that I was part of it.'
We were speaking on the Wimbledon terrace, high above Court No 3. As I fired off questions, Sinner lounged in a comfy chair, his long body stretched almost parallel to the ground like human spaghetti. All elbows and angles on the court, he is contrastingly languid off it: a man saving his energy for when he needs it most.
Sinner is an unusual Italian, with his red hair and pale skin, but then he grew up in South Tyrol – the Alpine skiing paradise where German is the first language. The last time we met, during 2023's World Tour Finals, I asked him whether he empathised with Andy Murray in the sense of being an outsider in his own country. But he shot me down quickly, pointing out that he had left home aged 13 to train with coaching savant Riccardo Piatti at an Italian academy near Monaco. 'I had all Italian people surround me,' he insisted, 'so I feel now fully Italian.'
As we chatted this week, three members of the Lavazza team looked on. The Italian coffee brand is proud to have had an association with Sinner since 2018, when he was just another teenage wannabe. And the Lavazza family were more than happy to assist him directly in February, at the start of his three-month doping ban.
The family house in Monaco happened to boast a 'backyard clay court' – in Cahill's words – which was one of the few places where Sinner was allowed to train. Only in April did the terms of his suspension relax, whereupon Draper's arrival for a training block coincided with an upgrade to the famous Monte Carlo Country Club.
'We asked Jack if he could come,' Sinner recalled of that week, 'because I needed some feedback from the best players in the world. And it was good for me to see I was still quite rusty. Day by day, we tried to work on things, trying to go to Rome with certain feelings. After some time, we found it.'
Sinner's clean-cut image was undoubtedly damaged by his two positive tests for the banned steroid clostebol, which he justified by explaining that his physical trainer had contaminated him during a massage. After initially being cleared of all charges, he later accepted a three-month ban from the World Anti-Doping Agency on the grounds of 'strict liability'.
The convenient timing of the ban, which did not affect Sinner's participation in any grand-slam events, caused disquiet among certain members of his peer group, even if others – including Draper – defended him staunchly. The public response was also mixed, although fortunately Sinner says that 'I am not the kind of person who is on social media for an hour every day… There are weeks when I am zero on it.'
When I asked him about the abusive online messages that disappointed gamblers send to players after each defeat, he looked unmoved. For one thing, the world No 1 doesn't lose many matches. For another, he is not a great one for screens, unless he is playing Fifa on his PlayStation. He is more interested in his cars and his kitchen, where he indulges a very Italian passion for cooking – his signature dish is tiramisu.
'I don't think we can stop this social-media thing,' Sinner said, 'because it's so big and it's very difficult. But yeah, my advice is always to just take the phone away. I have the most important people on WhatsApp, and that's all I need.' Jack Draper, we can assume, is one of them.