BBC Radio 5 Live’s All About… series has crossed the Alps for its French Open special, with reporter Russell Fuller and producer Jonathan Jurejko spending five days in Sesto Pusteria, the Italian-Austrian border village where Jannik Sinner learned to ski before he learned to slide a forehand. The documentary, which airs on Saturday at 10:00 BST and drops on BBC Sounds the same morning, traces a path from a 2,000-resident Dolomite hamlet to Roland Garros, where the world number one begins his campaign on Sunday as the man to beat on terre battue for the first time in his career.
Sinner arrives in Paris with 26 wins from his last 28 matches, the Australian Open and Italian Open titles already banked in 2026, and a 19-match clay-court winning streak that stretches back to a defeat by Casper Ruud in Monte Carlo last April. He has dropped serve only nine times in his last 47 sets on the surface. The 24-year-old is the first Italian man to enter the French Open as top seed in the Open Era, and the bookmakers have him at 6-4 to lift the Coupe des Mousquetaires — shorter odds than Rafael Nadal carried into any of his 14 titles at the tournament.
From Sesto to the summit
The 30-minute documentary leans heavily on voices from Sinner’s childhood. Heribert Mayr, who coached the Italian’s youth ski team in Val Pusteria, tells Fuller that the eight-year-old Sinner won the national giant slalom title in 2009 before quitting the snow at 13 to focus on tennis. “He had the quiet head for both,” Mayr says in the programme. “But on the court he could lose and learn. On the mountain a mistake is a mistake.”
Fuller also interviews Riccardo Piatti, the coach who took Sinner from the Bordighera academy at 14 to the ATP top 10, and Darren Cahill and Simone Vagnozzi, the current coaching pair credited with rebuilding his serve and second-shot patterns through 2024. The programme reconstructs the three-month doping suspension Sinner served between February and May last year — a clostebol contamination case that cost him no ranking points but kept him out of Indian Wells, Miami and Monte Carlo — and the immediate aftermath, when he returned at the Italian Open and reached the final.
- Career Grand Slam titles: 4 (Australian Open 2024, 2025, 2026; US Open 2024)
- Weeks at world number one: 71 (third on the all-time Italian list behind nobody)
- 2026 win-loss record entering Roland Garros: 32-3
- Career meetings with Carlos Alcaraz: 8-7 in Sinner’s favour
The Alcaraz problem and a shifting clay order
The documentary does not duck the central tension of Sinner’s Roland Garros bid. Carlos Alcaraz, the two-time defending champion, has won their last three matches on clay, including the Madrid final earlier this month in three sets that lasted three hours and 49 minutes. Fuller puts the head-to-head to former British number one Tim Henman, who tells the programme that Sinner’s improved drop shot and a heavier kick serve out wide on the deuce court give him “the first genuine clay-court weapon he’s ever had against Carlos”.
The wider draw has thinned. Novak Djokovic, a three-time champion in Paris, withdrew on Thursday with the knee injury that has dogged him since the Monte Carlo semi-finals. Alexander Zverev, the 2024 finalist, arrives off back-to-back early exits in Madrid and Rome. Stefanos Tsitsipas and Casper Ruud, both former finalists, sit outside the top 10 for the first time since 2021. The path, on paper, has rarely looked clearer for a first-time Roland Garros champion not named Alcaraz.
What a Paris title would mean
Should Sinner complete the set in Paris, he would become the first Italian man to win the French Open since Nicola Pietrangeli in 1960 and only the ninth man in the Open Era to hold three of the four majors simultaneously. A title would also make him the youngest man to complete a career Grand Slam since Rafael Nadal in 2010, and the first player to win his maiden Roland Garros as the world number one since Novak Djokovic in 2016.
The economic stakes in Italy are not trivial either. Italian Tennis Federation figures released this week show registered players have climbed to 921,000, up 38% in three years. Sinner’s Sky Italia documentary in February drew 2.1 million viewers, more than any tennis broadcast in the country’s history. The Foro Italico sold out for all 14 days of the Italian Open for the first time. All About… French Open arrives, then, as both a portrait and a pre-match programme — the story of how a ski racer from a German-speaking village became the man Paris is built around for the next fortnight.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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