Jannik Sinner doesn’t really handle heat well, or so it would seem given his track record.
It nearly toppled him at January’s Australian Open, before Novak Djokovic finished the job. With extreme heatwaves sweeping Melbourne that week the stadium roof was closed, providing a strictly climate-controlled environment for the players.
The result — in a four-hour-12-minute epic, Djokovic won 3-6, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4.
On Thursday, with temperatures climbing to 30 degrees Celsius in Paris, Sinner, who was not at his fittest from the morning, succumbed. Though he did not blame the heat for his second-round loss to Juan Manuel Cerundolo, he admitted that he felt ‘dizzy’ and was affected by cramps.
Temperatures on Thursday, however, were not sufficient to engage the French Open’s heat rule, a spokesperson for the French Tennis Federation said.
The rule is based on the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT), which accounts for humidity, sun and wind among other factors. If it reaches 30 degrees Celsius or higher, there can be 10-minute breaks inserted between the second and third sets for women’s matches and between the third and fourth sets for men’s matches.
If it hits 32 degrees, outdoor matches are suspended. Unlike at the Australian Open, there is no provision that the roofs on Court Philippe-Chatrier and Court Suzanne-Lenglen must close. There have been no suspensions this year and the temperature has hovered mostly around 30 degrees.
With Sinner’s loss and Carlos Alcaraz absent, this may be Djokovic’s best chance to win his 25th grand slam title. He survived his own battle with the heat on Wednesday, during a nearly four-hour duel with Valentin Royer.
“When you play a three-and-a-half hour match on clay, it’s long and very exhausting,” he said. “Physically spent quite a bit of energy today on a very hot day. Very challenging conditions.”
The conditions for the first few days of the tournament have also exposed a lack of preparedness for unseasonably hot conditions on the part of both players and the tournament. There is little shade on the grounds, and none on the outer courts. Players have complained about a lack of ice and about water in the courtside refrigerators not being as cold as they are used to.