World No. 1 Jannik Sinner laboured past Russia’s Daniil Medvedev on Saturday to book his place in the Internazionali BNL d’Italia final, completing a semifinal that began Friday evening and was halted by rain in the deciding set.
The 24-year-old Italian eventually prevailed 6-2, 5-7, 6-4 in two hours and 37 minutes of play spread across two days, extending his ATP Tour winning streak to 28 matches and setting a new record of 33 consecutive victories at Masters 1000 level — the tier of events that sits just below the Grand Slams.
Friday night drama. Sinner had looked imperious in a dominant opening set before the world No. 9 dragged him into a far more punishing physical contest. Medvedev’s variation and depth pushed the top seed deep behind the baseline, and television cameras repeatedly caught Sinner doubled over between points trying to recover his breath.
The Russian levelled the match in the second set, and although Sinner regrouped to lead 4-2 in the decider, heavy rain forced the chair umpire to suspend play at 9:45 p.m. local time with Medvedev serving at advantage.
A restless night. Returning to Campo Centrale on Saturday afternoon roughly 18 hours later, Sinner held to love, generated two match points on the Medvedev serve, failed to convert, then held his nerve to serve out the win. “To be honest, it was a tough and different kind of challenge.
At night I normally never have trouble sleeping, but last night wasn’t easy because when you are in the third set, you know you are almost finished, and yet you have to come back out and you never know what is going to happen because it is basically a new start to the match. There were nerves,” Sinner admitted after qualifying.
The bigger picture. The win keeps the Italian on course for an extraordinary piece of history. Sinner has already lifted the trophy at the first four Masters 1000 events of the year — Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo and Madrid — and victory in Sunday’s final would give him his 29th career title and his fifth of 2026.
It would also make him only the second player in history, after Novak Djokovic, to have won all nine Masters 1000 tournaments on the calendar, completing the so-called Career Golden Masters. No Italian man has lifted the Rome trophy since Adriano Panatta in 1976.
Looking ahead. Standing between Sinner and that history is Norway’s Casper Ruud, the world No. 25, who eased into the final earlier Saturday with a 6-1, 6-1 demolition of Italy’s Luciano Darderi.
The bigger question for the home favorite, however, is the toll of a 157-minute semifinal carried over two days, with Roland Garros — the only Grand Slam missing from his résumé and the stated main objective of his season — beginning in just ten days. The French Open runs from May 24 to June 7.
