Jannik Sinner has returned to the top of the world rankings after breaking one of the most extraordinary ties in world sport.
Going into the final of the Monte Carlo Masters, Sinner and his chief rival Carlos Alcaraz had played 3,302 points against each other. In a remarkable statistic, they had shared the spoils down the middle by winning 1,651 points apiece.
They had also each spent 66 weeks at world No 1, but Sinner has now forged ahead in both categories after defeating Alcaraz by a 7-6, 6-3 margin on a windy day in Monaco.
Here was the first renewal of the so-called “Sincaraz” rivalry in 2026. Sinner and Alcaraz faced off six times last season, including in the finals of three of the four grand slams. Yet the pace of their duel had slackened somewhat, until this week, with no competitive meetings since the ATP Finals in Turin last November.
Even so, they have still managed to share the biggest events of the new season between them, with Alcaraz winning in Melbourne and Doha while Sinner completed the “Sunshine Double” by hoovering up Indian Wells and Miami back-to-back.
In the circumstances, you might have expected a clash for the ages. But the conditions in Monte Carlo – combined with some understandable edginess from both players – made for a scruffy encounter between two men who struggled for timing. The clipboard-wielders counted 83 unforced errors between the pair, with Alcaraz the more regular offender as he kept pushing his backhand long.
After an early exchange of breaks, the opening set went to a particularly tense tie-break, and the key factor proved to be the Sinner serve. It had been a tricky day for this vital shot, as Sinner was uncharacteristically wayward in the early stages. But when the set was on the line, he settled into a seamless rhythm, making all six of his first serves, and pushing Alcaraz into a series of desperate lunges to his backhand side.
The pressure proved too much for the defending champion, who double-faulted as he faced a second set point at 5-6. It was one of five double-faults in a spotty performance from Alcaraz, and they usually came at important moments. Another instance set up a break point at 3-4 in set two, allowing Sinner to move within a game of victory.
The exchange of the world No 1 ranking, which Alcaraz had held since November, was always a strong probability during this clay-court season because of the rolling nature of the rankings system.
While Alcaraz had been a dominant force at this stage of last season, winning Monte Carlo and Rome as well as the French Open, Sinner only played the last of these events because of his controversial doping ban. As a result, every point Sinner collects until late May will count as profit, while Alcaraz will probably lose ground. He has a massive 4,300 ranking points to defend, and is unlikely to sweep the board again now that his chief rival has returned to the tour.
How well Sinner is performing – this was his fourth-consecutive Masters 1000 title, dating back to Paris in November, which equals a record held jointly by Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. As for the specific trilogy he has just pulled off – the two big US hard-court events of the spring, plus the first on European clay – only Djokovic has matched that in the past.
The stage is now set for a two-month wrestling match on the red dirt of Madrid, Rome and Paris. On top of that, Alcaraz has agreed to play an extra tournament in Barcelona next week while Sinner takes a well-earned break.
For the moment, the force is very much with Sinner, after 17 straight victories in which he has only dropped a single set (against Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic on Thursday). However, one suspects that this rivalry will go on ebbing and flowing for as long as the two giants of the tour keep tinkering with their games. As Alcaraz suggested in a congratulatory post on X, “We will continue, there is a long way to go in the clay swing!”
Alcaraz still leads the grand-slam reckoning by seven titles to four, as well as the head-to-head by 10 wins to seven. He will hope that, even if Sinner is the more consistent performer on the men’s tour, his own ability to peak for the biggest events should come to the fore at Roland Garros.