Perhaps the most thrilling moment of Jannik Sinner’s maiden U.S. Open title run was the press conference before the tournament. Typically there isn’t much to relish in the fluorescent lighting or stilted questions of a conference room, but this time, there was a crackle in the atmosphere.

Earlier that week, the morning after Sinner won one of the biggest titles of his career at the Cincinnati Open, the International Tennis Integrity Agency announced that he’d twice tested positive for the anabolic steroid Clostebol this past March. His alibi involved a fitness trainer who provided a steroid spray to heal a small cut on the pinky finger of a physiotherapist, who then unknowingly massaged the prohibited substance into Sinner’s cracked skin. The volumes detected were minute; the anti-doping authorities found Sinner’s explanation plausible and did not issue a ban because he was found at no fault of negligence. Because of his team’s unusually speedy and apparently persuasive response, all of this played out invisibly and was only revealed several months after the fact. Fellow players were outraged by the fact that the men’s world No. 1 was able to maintain his privacy and continue competing during the investigation. Until that presser before the U.S. Open, Sinner himself had yet to speak about it publicly.

Players are always late, but 20 minutes after the scheduled start time, it started to feel like Sinner was going to run out the clock. Then he walked into the room and sat down, his often chaotic red curls looking coiffed for the occasion, and his eyes narrowed slightly. At first there was a beat of silence, as if no journalist in the room wanted to be the first to ask about the only topic that anyone wanted to ask about. One tactfully vague softball about the doping situation was tossed his way, and Sinner answered briefly, and then there was an interjection. “OK, we won’t be entertaining any more questions on that subject,” said the conference’s moderator, a man with the demeanor and croaky voice of a stern umpire in a baseball movie for children. “If you have a question about another subject…”

Another subject! Unconsciously I found myself blubbering the words “No, you can’t,” my contribution to the general ruckus. Former tennis player and current NBC commentator Mary Carillo led the counterattack with her clout, and the other journalists pressed on. Sinner kept answering.

With the same cool precision that characterizes his tennis, the 23-year-old fielded all questions about this saga. Often in these conferences Sinner takes on a funny, slightly harried tone that suggests he finds the question insipid, but here he was patient and clear. He spoke about the staffers who made the critical error with the steroid spray, both recently fired, though he thanked them for their help over the last two years, and said he was now in search of “clean air.” He said he was relieved to have all this out in the open, after months of dealing with the authorities; his coach Darren Cahill said that his player had to sit through a six-and-a-half-hour video call in the middle of a tournament the previous week.

Sinner said he didn’t take any shortcuts, and that his team was able to quickly suss out the source and mount their appeal. He pronounced “anti-doping” as if it were an Italian digestif made with walnuts. He talked about his reputation and said he was learning “who is my friend and who is not my friend, no?” He even tested out an uncharacteristic bit of stagecraft, perhaps workshopped ahead of time: He chuckled and counted off eight zeros on his fingers and thumbs when describing the amount of the steroid metabolite found in his test sample. 

The conference was slammed shut after 10 minutes, though there were enough questions to last an hour. I left the room with lingering concerns, some of which were answered by Sinner over the coming days, some of which were answered by an anti-doping official I interviewed, and some of which may always remain a mystery, known only to those inside his camp. But it was obvious in retrospect, despite the attempt to cut off all doping-related questions, that the best thing he could have done to boost his credibility was answer everyone’s inquiries head-on, which he wound up doing. “I like to dance in the pressure storm,” he had said in January, after winning the Australian Open final in a comeback from two sets down. Here he was, dancing again.

Four days later, Sinner was dancing pretty terribly. As he was pieced up by Mackie McDonald, a player outside the top 100, it seemed that the leering from the outside world had gotten to him. This was not a match anyone would’ve flagged for upset potential. The undersized McDonald is probably better than his ranking would suggest, and the two had played a solid three-setter last season, but nothing in his arsenal should have threatened the year’s undisputed hard-court master.

In a green kit that almost camouflaged him into the court, Sinner looked a wreck. He spilled 14 unforced errors in the first set and saw his serve broken thrice. The world No. 1 went down an early break in the second set, which was when I really began to wonder about the psychological damage of the week’s events, but then he abruptly restored order. There was nothing to say as Sinner thrashed McDonald for the remainder of the match, winning 18 of the last 22 games. It was, surprisingly, his first-ever victory in Arthur Ashe Stadium, a measure of the immense leap he’d made in the last year.

Sinner floated past his second- and third-round opponents, while his chief rivals Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic, who had just beaten the shit out of each other in pursuit of an Olympic gold, spiraled out in the second and third round respectively. Those upsets cleared up the draw and made Sinner the prohibitive favorite.

The doping-related questions began to thin out, replaced by second-order questions about the response to the doping situation, which were in turn replaced by bog-standard questions about the matches. An official at the ITIA told me it was the only instance he could recall of a player successfully appealing their provisional suspension, which is what allowed Sinner to return seamlessly to competition without the outside world finding out. When other players complained about the apparent difference in treatment, there was truth to it; these are the benefits of working with a world No. 1’s legal budget and offering an immediate account of how the substance got into his body. I still had some points I wanted to clarify—specific timelines of who did what, and when— but it was tricky to fish for the answers.

It was an odd rhythm, trying to have a conversation with someone by asking them a maximum of one question in a public setting every two days. Forming the question was itself an art: Ask something fresh enough that the player’s eyes don’t glaze over as they enter lorem ipsum autopilot, but not so brusque that they turn defensive. I asked Sinner how it felt to continue working with his trainer and physiotherapist for several months after their catastrophic steroid-related errors, but he ducked it and said he planned to hire new ones soon. Every press conference, he spoke about narrowing his world down to the people he cared about and trusted most. He did not seem the type to be wading around on social media, hungry for provocation.

That didn’t mean he lacked colleagues who live for mess. In press after the second round, Sinner was asked how he’d feel if he were interviewed by Nick Kyrgios, the quasi-active player now serving as an ESPN commentator and on-court interviewer, who’s about as distant from Sinner in disposition as is possible. Kyrgios had been leading the charge of Sinner skepticism online, in a characteristically high-volume and factually loose manner. “I don’t want to respond on what he said. Everyone is free to say everything, so it’s OK,” Sinner said, initially cracking into a smile about as wide as he’d shown in years. “But no, I’m always quite relaxed. I’m someone who forgets quite fast something.” The gist: I don’t think about him at all.

Tommy Paul, Sinner’s fourth-round opponent, appeared to take a dig at him the week before the tournament, when he posted a photo of a physiotherapist giving him a massage with black latex gloves—an odd, pointed visual. Paul, who has hovered at the threshold of the top 10, tends to lure spectacular tennis out of elite opponents. He’s such a versatile athlete that he can almost mirror their best qualities for a passage of play, best seen when he plays Alcaraz and matches the spectacle. Even in a cohort of the most coordinated people in the world, Paul stands out as a specimen with his fast-twitch jitteriness and deft hands. He also brought out the red-bloodedness of the ruinous lower-bowl crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium in his match against Sinner, and pretty soon a broadly dispersed group of men who had probably spent between $50 and $60 for their mild buzz and disconcertingly red faces were chanting “USA! USA!” A friend and fellow reporter told me later that he’d heard scattered calls of “Cheater” in the mix, too.

Paul stayed nose-to-nose with Sinner for two sets, but the differences between them started to tell. At his best, Sinner’s tennis feels both languid and violent; it can be difficult to connect the cause with the effect. In between shots his lank frame looks almost floppy, and as he skids and scrambles and makes his little adjustment steps around the court, you wonder if those feet will ever give out from underneath him. But right when the ball is approaching, all that ambient floppiness is aligned into one sublimely synchronized chain, from foot to hip to wrist, as he readies his his full-body slingshot groundstrokes. A compact backswing, a snap, and the ball is gone. The visual is loose and jangly, but the sound is like someone hucking a billiard ball against a garage door. Real power in tennis comes from that balance and relaxation and timing, rather than pure muscular output. Sinner’s what you’d get if you made a whole tennis player out of that axiom.

“E-las-ti-ci-ty,” intoned the veteran tennis writer next to me, snapping off every syllable. As Sinner pinged groundstroke after groundstroke off the precise center of his racquet’s string bed, dozens of perfect hits a row, it was difficult to believe that his origins lay in any known province of man. His play aligned suspiciously with the popular cinematic depiction of aliens: slender, possessed of a strength irreconcilable with our understanding of human anatomy, demure in affect, capable of lethality without visible exertion. I found it hypnotic, though perhaps it could be a little unsettling to the uninitiated observer.

Paul decided that he couldn’t hang in the rallies with an error-proof extraterrestrial, and hauled himself to net, only for Sinner to deliver an eclectic feast of passing shots. The Italian won the first two sets in tiebreaks and, having broken his opponent down, took the third set with ease. Afterward I asked Paul about the feeling of playing against him. “Unreal out of the corners,” he said, calling Sinner “the best ball-striker on tour”—a claim that felt spicy but, as I rolled it around in my head, also true. Judging from that performance, it would be difficult to argue that anyone else on the planet is better at the simple, terrible task of placing a tennis ball heavy and deep into the opposing court, over and over. In his interviews, Sinner always talks about improvement—his coaches have said that one of the hardest parts of their job is tearing him away from the practice courts—but it was hard to conceive of how a human could get all that much better at that task.

The quarterfinal between Sinner and Daniil Medvedev felt like the de facto final. At that stage, they were the only two major champions left in the draw, and both especially difficult to beat on hard courts. They also happened to be the two finalists at this past Australian Open. There, Medvedev had started the match with an aggression that was almost unrecognizable, seized the first two sets, and then gradually ran out of reserves as Sinner collected himself to win in five sets. Medvedev found his revenge in the quarterfinal at Wimbledon, dispatching a sickly Sinner in another five-setter. Both were humming through the U.S. Open, setting up the makings of a classic.

While I wish I could illuminate you with stories of such an epic, with lots of dramatic moments and visually arresting shot-making, you’d be better off left in the dark. These men never played well at the same time. Medvedev played some of the deadliest tennis of his season in the second set, but otherwise laid a mystifying egg on a court where he’s said that his forehand gets some added sting against some of the best players alive. The enduring image of this match was a backhand-to-backhand exchange, at about 40 percent pace, until one man hit it into the net. Sinner won in four sets.

Two days later, the semifinal managed to be even more unpleasant in a different sense. Sinner had to play his close friend Jack Draper, a lefty with a dangerous serve who had not yet dropped a set at the U.S. Open and was making his first deep run at the majors. This being his first match of such gravity, there were some nerves at play, which would eventually manifest themselves in various displays of extreme moisture.

It was only 78 degrees out, but quite humid—not pleasant to sit in, but also not close to extreme conditions by the harsh standards of pro tennis. Draper was becoming, before my eyes, the sweatiest entity I’d ever seen in person. He is a sweaty man by reputation, but this was his most alarming performance to date. He soaked through his oversized shirt until it seemed to have the weight and sheen of a leather jacket. Draper at one point had to briefly pause play to change into new shoes, because he had fully saturated those, too. 

At some point in the match, I saw Draper mop up the court. My assumption was that he had managed to create a dangerous pool of sweat on the court just by standing in one place for too long. But the reality was gnarlier: Jack Draper had vomited twice, so subtly that I did not register it despite sitting a couple of rows away from him. Standing at the back of the court, preparing to return serve, he barked up the puke without ceremony—blap, blap—and immediately went to his towel, cleaned up the mess, and threw it back in the box at the back of the court. Draper vomited twice more over the course of the match. He wiped his face with the same towel he’d used to mop up the vomit. Stalking around the court with a starved look in his eyes, he looked like he needed to be hosed down and administered an IV, stat.

In the most surreal and overstimulating point of the tournament, Sinner ran up to a drop volley, ran all the way back to retrieve a lob, slipped and hurt himself at the back of the court, and scrambled to his feet just in time to meet what should have been a lethal overhead smash, which he ripped back at blood-curdling speed right past a dumbstruck Draper. After this Herculean effort, Sinner keeled over in pain to massage his wrist while the crowd howled its approval. Too many things were happening at once. A minute later, both men sat down for the changeover and were visited by medical staff, one for the wrist and the other for reaching new frontiers in on-court vomit. Through it all, the tournament’s catchphrase, “The world’s healthiest sport,” was projected onto the court on the TV broadcast.

“I’m definitely someone who is, I think, quite an anxious human being,” said a freshly showered Draper later in press, describing the miserable feeling of being unable to keep food and fluids down while playing a brutally taxing major semifinal. The fall didn’t compromise Sinner’s strokes, and the top seed prevailed in straight sets, if woozy ones.

Winning six best-of-five tennis matches in a row at a major can be ugly work. Winning seven is even harder. A tiny cadre of men had kept most of the majors to themselves over the past two decades. But among the youth, there was an unfamiliar note of hope. Djokovic’s premature exit ensured that 2024 would be the first season in 22 years in which a member of the Big Three—Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer—did not take home a major title. Throughout the second week of the tournament I heard American players speak about how the field had opened up for them. Delusion is part of the job description of a professional athlete, and surely the early upsets made this U.S. Open feel like it was for the taking, but they might not have fully internalized the impending harshness of life under the regime of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner.

Taylor Fritz would be the first American delegate to challenge one of them in a major final. The 26-year-old conquered his grim history with quarterfinals, and in the semifinal survived Frances Tiafoe, who submitted to anxiety cramps while on the cusp of closing out the match. Fritz thought the environment of Sunday’s final would actually be less stressful than playing his friend and countryman in the previous round, and articulated a peculiar sentiment: He said he was even looking forward to playing Sinner. “I don’t know, he’s like a very strong ball striker, but I feel like I always hit the ball really nice off of his ball,” Fritz said in press after beating Tiafoe. He and Sinner had split their previous meetings, 1-1, so perhaps he could find reason for optimism in there.

Fritz can beat a lot of players with first-strike tennis, but against the best, who can reliably put him on the defensive, it always looks a bit precarious. I’m not sure I’d ever seen someone make such crystal-clear contact with a tennis ball while on the verge of toppling over face-first. A limited mover, but a sharp analyst of the game, Fritz made sound tactical choices and could walk you through them clearly after the match. But Sinner could strike a ball just as purely as Fritz, and would cover the court in ways Fritz never will. To have a chance at the title, Fritz would have to serve his best and hit ambitious targets from the baseline.

Instead Fritz had his serve broken in the first game of the match. Sinner’s average ball looked like it was enough to overwhelm. He tempted Fritz to overhit, made him totter forward for the occasional drop shot, and exposed the vast chasm between them. A few brilliant rallies notwithstanding, the first two sets hurtled toward the expected outcome. The behavior of Taylor Swift, a few sections over from me, probably received about as much attention from the crowd as the Taylor on court. Fritz was so cooked that even goofy-ass pseudo-populist Vivek Ramaswamy couldn’t be bothered to chime in on the tepid “USA, USA” chants he had clapped along to earlier in the match.

In the third set, Fritz’s serve finally began to hum, but Sinner foreclosed on that comeback attempt. He moved through the endgame with a kind of Djokovician finality, as if he’d done this a dozen times in the past and would do it a dozen more. After the straight-set victory, Sinner threw his hands in the air, and left them there, in keeping with his low-impact style of celebration. Nothing frenzied, nothing euphoric—just a young man taking in the cold clean air at the top of a mountain. He went off to hug his coaches and girlfriend Anna Kalinskaya, and, since the hallmark of every big-time tennis player is a charmingly unexpected celebrity in the player’s box, he also hugged the musician Seal, who had become his pal via a mutual friend at this tournament a few years ago.

In Sinner’s remarks afterward, he proactively brought up the challenges of the doping incident and the pall it had cast over this phase of his career. He dedicated the title to his ailing aunt, letting the usual stoicism slip for a teary moment. “I don’t know how much longer I will have her in my life,” he said. “If there was a wish I could make, I would wish good health on everyone, but unfortunately it’s not possible.” Later in press, he talked about how these experiences helped him differentiate between tennis and “real life.” He is a quiet presence, but his answers can sometimes be meditative and disarming, making the listener feel like they’ve got all the wrong priorities. Nowhere in his post-championship words could one find a passage of overt, uncomplicated joy. It wasn’t that sort of tournament.

Alcaraz’s 2022 win in New York felt like a young star eagerly bursting into public consciousness; two years later, Sinner’s felt something like the opposite. A young man, already private and modest by disposition, found himself under suspicion from colleagues and online hordes alike, burrowed inward to avoid the noise, and emerged from the ground seven matches later, triumphant. He isn’t fully in the clear, though: The World Anti-Doping Agency has another three weeks to potentially appeal the decision that allowed Sinner to avoid a ban, and reputational rehabilitation would be its own slow and imperfect process. In the interim there would be syringe emojis in the comment sections, grumbling in the locker room, and lingering questions in the press. There were jokes, too, about whether we were witnessing a Sinner heel turn in real time. That still felt unlikely—his semifinal opponent quipped that his one weakness is that he’s too nice, and crowds hadn’t noticeably soured—but if it does happen, its origins would be traced back to this murky juncture of his career.

On my way out of the tournament for the last time this season, I almost walked right into him. Sinner was holding his trophy, letting it dangle slack at his side like a gym bag full of dank sneakers, trailed by handlers. He walked out to stand on the ledge of the fountain for a trophy shoot, smiling intermittently into the strobing camera flashes as Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” blared over the desolate grounds. “Hamburger” was the key detail of his post-championship celebration, according to his appearance on The Today Show the morning after. And then, having digested that along with the previous fortnight, Jannik Sinner would assuredly step back onto the treadmill of improvement and continue to perfect what already seems so uncannily close to perfection.