MELBOURNE, Australia — The Australian Open’s heat rules did not favor Jannik Sinner, but for the second year in a row in Melbourne, an almighty slice of tennis luck did.
The two-time defending champion was severely cramping midway through his third-round match against Eliot Spizzirri, the American world No. 85. With temperatures approaching 100 degrees (38 Celsius) and trailing 2-1 in the third set after splitting the first two, Sinner could barely serve and was struggling to move. Spizzirri broke serve to go up 3-1 after a Sinner serve clocked at 69 mph, well below even a slow second serve.
But during the game, the Australian Open’s Heat Stress Scale (HSS), which takes into account air temperature, radiant heat (or the strength of the sun), humidity and wind speed, ticked up to 5.0. Tournament rules mandate that once it does, play stops at an even number of games, and with four played in the third set, it was time to close the roof on Rod Laver Arena and for the players to exit the court.
Sinner’s team knew this, and were telling him during the game to just get through the next few points and then try to recharge during the break. Which he did, after limping off the court knowing he had just been handed a major reprieve. Spizzirri shook his head and smiled in livid frustration, but knew there was nothing he could do. The rules were being followed, even if they came at a hugely convenient time for Sinner and at exactly the wrong one for his opponent.
On the resumption, after an eight-minute break during which Sinner was alone and where neither player could receive treatment, the Italian immediately broke back. He then rode that momentum to take the third set, when there was a 10-minute break, also per the tournament rules.
Sinner went a break down early in the fourth set, but rallied to claim a 4-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 victory in three hours and 45 minutes.
“I got lucky with the heat rule,” Sinner said in his on-court interview at the end of the match.
Jannik Sinner’s difficulties in hot conditions have become a feature of his Australian Opens — even in winning the event twice. (Phil Walter / Getty Images)
The heat rule was applied according to the processes set out by Tennis Australia, just as the anti-doping rules were during Sinner’s case last year. But tennis is so weighted in favour of the best players — they usually get the best courts at a time of their choosing, they get the biggest appearance fees at smaller tournaments — that for many what happened Saturday felt especially convenient. Though Sinner’s being put in a day session with the roof open did not entirely align with this point-of-view.
This good fortune felt especially pertinent because a year ago, something similar happened to Sinner at the Australian Open. Early in the fourth set of his fourth-round match against Holger Rune, also played in searing Melbourne heat, Sinner looked similarly uncomfortable.
Sinner and Rune were locked at 1-1 in sets, with the Italian having saved break point at 6-3, 3-6, 1-1, *30-40 in a remarkable rally. Sinner then got to 3-2, but took an 11-minute off-court medical timeout for medical examination. He returned to win the third set, before he hit a serve down in the fourth that broke the net bolt and necessitated a further 20-minute stoppage. Following the resumption, Sinner won in four sets.
“I was lucky today,” Sinner said in his post-match news conference, after a match in which Rune looked to be in charge after winning the second set and looking more physically secure in the early stages of the third. After using that word again on Saturday, Sinner was asked in a news conference if he is worried that his luck will run out.
“I don’t know… in the back of my mind I know how much I work. I feel well-prepared even if some problems could happen potentially on the court.
“Of course, there are going to be days where you don’t find a way. It’s not that everything is going your way. But with a positive mindset, for sure more positive things can happen. If you are in a court thinking in a negative way, most likely more negative things can come towards you.”
But in both the matches with Spizzirri and Rune, Sinner showed the fight and skill required to take advantage of opponents missing opportunities. For Spizzirri, the first two sets and four games were hugely frustrating. Tennis is a skill-under-duress sport, and Spizzirri, the former Texas Longhorn, had managed that balance the better of the two players until the roof closed. He outplayed Sinner in the opening set, before holding up physically better than the Italian in the third. Sinner did not surpass Spizzirri on total points won until the eighth game of the fourth set.
But the impact of having that physical advantage wiped away weighed on the American, who lost some of the ruthless he had shown when the players came back and did not test Sinner enough as he continued to struggle with movement even after the roof closed. Rune too missed opportunities a year ago. And as soon as Sinner’s level rose, especially right at the end of the fourth, it was clear he had no route back into the match.
Sinner’s luck at last year’s Wimbledon was perhaps purer. Grigor Dimitrov retired with a pectoral muscle tear when leading by two sets to love in their fourth-round match — leaving Sinner with the task of winning three sets in a row against a redlining opponent, but one who also had to manage his nerves and who had played at a stratospheric level, the maintenance of which ultimately injured him.
And perhaps more pertinent than Sinner’s apparent good fortune is, as he admitted in his on-court interview, whether he can meaningfully overcome such a glaring deficiency in an otherwise close-to-impermeable game.
Eliot Spizzirri pushed Jannik Sinner to the brink on his first Australian Open appearance. (Martin Keep / AFP via Getty Images)
His struggles Saturday were not a surprise; they were entirely expected. As soon as it became clear that Melbourne was going to heat up over the tournament’s first weekend, all eyes were on Saturday’s order of play and whether Sinner would be given a day slot. Once he was his match felt like it wouldn’t be such a formality; once his match started, it became apparent that Spizzirri was the one dealing better with the conditions as well as giving Sinner fits, making him uncomfortable in baseline rallies and preventing the world No. 2 from getting much advantage out of his first serve.
Spizzirri had only played five Grand Slam matches in his career prior, and played a five-setter in the previous round to beat Yibing Wu, while Sinner had won in straight sets against James Duckworth. Shouldn’t the two-time defending champion and four-time major winner have been the better at dealing with this sort of thing?
Sinner said afterwards that he hadn’t slept well the night before.
Sinner has a bad record when things start to get physical. He has still never won a match longer than 3 hours and 48 minutes, and he has lost his last three best-of-five set matches. He said afterward that he is looking to improve his durability, and part of the reason that he does not get much opportunity to do so is that he is so good and so efficient that players rarely have the opportunity to drag him into long matches. “Every player has his own small problems,” Sinner said in his news conference.
“Maybe this is mine. You don’t know. But for sure there is room to improve, which I’m quite sure we will do everything possible to improve in a positive way.”
Sinner’s status means he may barely play in the day again this tournament, and temperatures are not expected to be as high on the days he’ll be playing if he progresses.
The history of the tennis heat rule – and the impact of a necessary limit
The suspension of play for extreme heat was not a data point for the argument that the best players get special treatment. The events that transpired on Rod Laver Arena Saturday afternoon were nearly a decade in the making.
The ATP, WTA and other Grand Slams generally use a measurement known as the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, to assess conditions. The metric measures heat, humidity, the impact of radiant heat (from the sun) and wind.
Oven-hot days are a common occurrence at the Australian Open, but the heat in Melbourne can be drier than in places like New York, Washington D.C. and Cincinnati, which hold tournaments during the North American summer. To account for that difference, Ollie Jay, a professor of heat and health from the University of Sydney, developed a metric that would be unique to the Austrlalian climate, which it introduced in 2019 as the AO Heat Stress Scale.
That scale uses an algorithm that accounts for temperature, radiant heat, humidity and wind speed. Its limits were set based on research into how those factors affected an athlete undergoing peak exertion.
There are five zones of stress management, that range from increasing hydration to adding an extended break in play, to suspension.
When the day started Saturday, there was little doubt that the play was going to be suspended at some point. It was just a matter of when.
An empty tennis court at Melbourne Park due to the Australian Open heat rule. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
All morning and into the early afternoon, eyes were on the meter as it slowly rose, along with temperature and the radiant heat from the sun that felt increasingly scorching. This happens in Melbourne when the wind stops blowing off the seas to the south of the waterfront city and starts coming from the desert regions to the north. It can feel a little like existing with a hair dryer blowing in your face.
Sinner started visibly suffering from cramps around 2 p.m. Players are not allowed to take extended medical timeouts, which can last about 10 minutes, purely for cramping or loss of conditioning. The rules limit treatment for cramps to one 3-minute on-court treatment and then further massages and consultations, within the limits of the 90-second changeovers.
Sinner stayed within those rules. The only time he was penalized was when he took extra time before serving to consult with his coaching box and received a time violation from chair umpire Fergus Murphy.
His coach, Darren Cahill, told him to take the penalty and survive the third set. and then he would get the 10-minute break the rules called for. It turned out even better than that. The roof came over, and the conditions changed.
Sinner and Spizzirri were not the only people in the stadium, nor the other courts that saw roofs move across or play get suspended. Ball kids, umpires, tournament staff and fans also had to exist in 100-degree temperatures; extreme heat does not only affect the two people at the center of the court.
For Spizzirri, the negation of his physical advantage over Sinner would have stung. The Italian was not cramping in isolation from the heat, but also the intensity of Spizzirri’s play. In cooler temperatures, its impact was lessened; by the same token, the hot conditions gave Spizzirri a boost.
The heat rule is ultimately an objective limit designed for safety. Its subjective impact on a tennis match is harder to quantify, and will benefit different players in different matchups this tournament, and in the future.
