It's a moment's leap from the extraordinary successes of recent Olympics to the normality of Jannik Sinner's victories, and it happens this Monday, February 16th, when the triumphant Italian team in Milan-Cortina is taking a break after a memorable Sunday, starting with Federica Brignone's legendary second gold medal in the same edition. Today, the South Tyrolean tennis player returned to the court, after the disappointment of the Australian Open (defeated in the final by the almost 40-year-old Novak Djokovic). restarts from the Ato 500 tournament in Doha, Qatar, in which his rival Carlos Alcaraz is also registered and so we already have a suspicion of what the final will be.
To get there, however, you need to win the previous rounds and today Jannik did his duty by overcoming the 25-year-old Czech Tomas Machac, world number 31 who in 2025 reached a career-high ranking of number 20. The final score was 6-1, 6-4. In the second round, Sinner will face Australian Alexei Popyrin., 26, world number 53, against whom they have an incredibly even record: one win each. The two met for the first time in 2021, when the Italian was just starting out in top-level tennis and lost in straight sets at the ATP Masters 1000 in Madrid. Jannik's victory came at the last US Open, in the second round, with an easy 6-3, 6-2, 6-2.
