Jannik ushers golden era for Italian tennis

ROME, Italy (AFP) — Jannik Sinner will delight crowds at the Rome Open this week when the world No. 1 makes his return to tennis, but the Italian’s three-month doping ban has allowed other local rising stars to move into the limelight.

Sinner was on Monday joined in the top 10 of the men’s world rankings by Lorenzo Musetti, who is at No. 9 after reaching the Monte Carlo final and the Last Four in Madrid.

Meanwhile, Luciano Darderi and Flavio Cobolli won tournaments in Marrakesh and Bucharest in April, further underlining the strength in depth that Italian tennis has behind Sinner, a three-time Grand Slam winner.

Filippo Volandri, captain of the Italy team which has won the last two editions of the Davis Cup, told AFP that “Italian tennis is clearly in a golden age.”

“But it’s been a long time coming, we’re seeing the fruits of work which was started some time ago,” he added.

Volandri, who has been in charge of top-level male players for the Italian Tennis Federation (FITP) for the last nine years, showed AFP a graphic which illustrates Italy’s recent progress.

Between 2005 and 2015 Italian players won eight ATP titles — with seven of those in the lowest 250 category — but since 2016 the tally of tournament wins has more than tripled to 31.

Five of those 31 wins have come in top-level Master 1000 tournaments, with another three being Sinner’s Grand Slam triumphs. Sinner is responsible in total for 19 of Italy’s ATP wins since 2016.

“Jannik is the product of a movement which had already given us Matteo Berrettini reaching the Wimbledon final (in 2021). He is the result of a system that works,” Volandri said.

Michelangelo Dell’Edera, the director of the FITP’s Higher Training Institute, told AFP that the federation runs a geographically-decentralized system which was put in place at the end of the 1990s.

“Every province has a coach from the federation for children between 8-10 years old, while each region has a manager in charge of players between the ages of 11 and 16,” Dell’Edera explained.

Players were for a long time obliged to move to the national training center at Tirrenia, just up the Tuscany coast from Livorno, but that is no longer the case.

“Decentralization means making our skills available to young players and their coaches,” Volandri said.

“We’re reaching out to them rather than tearing them away from their families and their lives.”

Dell’Edera said the renaissance in Italian tennis has also come via a change in training philosophy and playing style.

“To make a comparison with another sport, we’ve gone from the marathon, where players were slugging forehands and backhands, to the 100m, a sort of ‘speed tennis’ where the emphasis is on the serve and return, two shots which determine whether a point can be won,” he said.