Jannik Sinner has revealed that he and his team “came to a conclusion which is very good” after undergoing testing to establish what triggered the physical breakdown that ended his Roland Garros campaign, as the world No. 1 sharpens his preparation for the defense of his Wimbledon title.
Speaking after his only grass-court outing before the Championships — a 6-3, 6-3 exhibition win over Britain’s Cameron Norrie at the Hurlingham Club on Wednesday — the Italian said the investigation into his French Open exit had reshaped how he trains. “We did some testing,” Sinner said. “We tried to understand what happened, we came to a conclusion which is very good.” He said his team had altered their methods to study how his body reacts in different conditions.
That exit ranks among the most startling Grand Slam upsets in years. Sinner led Argentina’s Juan Manuel Cerúndolo by two sets and 5-1, a single game from the third round, before he began to cramp and turn dizzy in searing Parisian heat. He won only a handful of games from that point, took a medical timeout, and ultimately fell 3-6, 2-6, 7-5, 6-1, 6-1 to a player ranked outside the top 50. The defeat ended a winning run of more than 30 matches and was the biggest shock of a tournament that Alexander Zverev would go on to win for his maiden major.
The collapse was all the more jarring given the form that preceded it. Sinner had arrived in Paris unbeaten since February, having swept the spring clay Masters events and completed the Career Golden Masters, and he was the overwhelming favorite for the one major still missing from his collection. Instead, his body gave way with the finish line in sight.
The 24-year-old has since recalibrated. He said his team would now actively seek out hotter training environments, reasoning that the tour’s conditions are becoming more extreme year on year and that adaptation has become essential. At Hurlingham he prepared with a cooling vest before taking the court on a day the UK Met Office issued a red heat warning, with temperatures climbing past 30C. Novak Djokovic, also scheduled to appear at the Giorgio Armani Tennis Classic, withdrew on the day, citing the heat.
The emphasis on heat resilience is striking given Sinner’s own assessment in Paris, where he played down the temperature as the decisive factor. He said at the time that he had woken feeling unwell and low on energy, and insisted the conditions alone had not beaten him. The changes he has now described — formal testing, altered training, deliberately seeking warmer practice — suggest his durability in extreme heat has nonetheless become a central project for his team.
Wednesday’s exhibition was Sinner’s first match on grass since he won Wimbledon in 2025 for his maiden title on the surface. In a clear departure from last year, when he tuned up at the Halle Open, he chose to skip every official ATP grass-court event — Queen’s, Halle and Eastbourne — leaving the one-off against Norrie, a former Wimbledon semi-finalist, as his sole competitive hit-out. He said he had been on grass for almost a week, that every day counted, and that the Hurlingham courts played slightly faster than those at the All England Club.
Sinner arrives at Wimbledon, which begins on Monday, as the overwhelming favorite. Carlos Alcaraz — the 2025 runner-up, a two-time champion and the man who beat Sinner in last year’s final and at Roland Garros in 2025 — has withdrawn with a wrist injury. With his principal rival absent, the Italian’s stiffest test may again be the heat and his own physical limits rather than any single opponent across the net.
It will also be Sinner’s first defense of a major title at the All England Club, and the stakes stretch beyond the fortnight. Having relinquished his other Grand Slam crowns over the past year, the Italian could be left holding none of the four majors should his Wimbledon title slip away in south-west London — an improbable thought given the dominance that defined his spring.
Whether the conclusions reached off court hold up under the strain of best-of-five tennis will only become clear once the Championships are underway. For now, Sinner is projecting calm. “We’ve made some changes,” he said. “We made some changes in all other things.”
