Carlos Alcaraz’s Epic French Open Comeback Is the Sports Moment of the Year

The sports moment of the year started out innocently enough: Jannik Sinner, already up a set at the French Open final on Sunday, led Carlos Alcaraz of Spain 3-0, in the second set. Sinner was playing steady tennis, the wingspan created by his wiry, lanky body allowing him to lunge at Alcaraz’s blistering shots. Up to this point, Sinner, who hails from Italy and recently enjoyed an audience with Pope Leo XIV, hadn’t lost a single set at this French Open. Maybe the three-month suspension Sinner served over a doping dispute this year had left him fresh for this French Open. 

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Maybe this was just his moment. 

But Alcaraz, whose fighting abilities naturally call to mind his fellow countryman Rafael Nadal—the 14-time French Open champion who was honored at the start of the tournament, and who has a statue in his honor at Roland Garros—wasn’t done. Alcaraz roared back to force a second-set tiebreaker. Sinner prevailed to go up two sets to love. Alcaraz made it interesting, but he had never come back from two sets down to win a match. 

Alcaraz got back in his groove to take the third set, 6-4. Sinner, though, was all set to finish it out in the fourth. Sinner had a 5-3 lead, and on Alcaraz’s serve, had three championship points. Three chances to win a third straight major and start thinking about a calendar-year Grand Slam, something no man has accomplished since Rod Laver did it in 1969. 

After the match, Alcaraz said he tried not to think of his predicament at this moment. On the first point, a rally ended with Sinner sending a shot long on the run. On the second one, Alcaraz’s second serve had enough kick on it to force a Sinner backhand return into the net. Sinner stuck a forehand into the net during a baseline rally on the third point: he had squandered a golden opportunity.

By this point, the Roland Garros crowd was cheering wildly for Alcaraz. It was nothing personal against Sinner. The fans were just impressed that he rose from the dead. 

And they wanted to see these two transcendent young players keep going at it. 

Alcaraz sent the crowd further into a frenzy by breaking Sinner’s serve to force a fourth-set tiebreaker, which Alcaraz won convincingly. Sinner seemed to struggle with fatigue at the start of the fifth set. He started limping slightly after charging in for a short ball. Alcaraz took advantage of Sinner’s diminished state to pull a couple of drop shots out of his hat: all that running and lunging Sinner was doing at the start was no more. Alcaraz went up 3-1 in the deciding set. He was in total control. Sinner had to be thinking about the three match points he squandered in the fourth set. Maybe Alcaraz would toy with Sinner the rest of the way.

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Now it was Sinner’s turn to flip the switch. With Alcaraz serving at 5-4 to win his second straight French Open title, he tried another drop shot: this time, Sinner summoned enough life force to get a racket on the ball right before it touched the clay. He broke Alcaraz’s serve and we were off to a match-deciding, 10-point tiebreaker. This breathtaking final had already exceeded five hours.    

Alcaraz won out from there. He took the first seven points of the tiebreaker. On match point, he fired a running passing-shot rocket up the sideline past Sinner. Somehow, at the end, Alcaraz appeared to have plenty left in the tank. 

Alcaraz won his fifth major in just as many finals appearances, 4-6, 6-7(4), 6-4, 7-6(3), 7-6 (10-2). The match took five hours, 29 minutes, making it the longest French Open final in history, and the second longest major final of all time (Novak Djokovic and Nadal went 5 hours, 53 minutes, at the 2012 Australian Open).

“This was one of the all-timers,” said John McEnroe on the TNT broadcast after it ended. 

This was the first time Alcaraz, 22, and Sinner, 23, met in a Grand Slam championship. Tennis cannot be in better hands, for the next decade or more. 

“Honestly I don’t know what I did,” Alcaraz, like the rest of us at a loss for words, said on TNT afterward. “I don’t know what happened.” 

But it did. The sports moment of 2025. And one of the best duels in the history of tennis.