Peer consensus moves faster than the actual ranking system. Jannik Sinner was the best player on the men’s tour, and everyone in the office figured it out before the computers did. Back in March, Tommy Paul borrowed a flavorful idiom from his Argentine fitness trainer and said that Sinner was “absolutely playing naked.” Gatekeeper of youth success Novak Djokovic issued his ruling in Monte-Carlo: “Best player in the world so far in 2024.” Chief rival Carlos Alcaraz said in Indian Wells that Sinner was “the best player in the world, without a doubt” (and went on to beat him). By June, Sinner had amassed the ranking points to claim the No. 1 slot for the first time in his career, at the age of 22, courtesy of an absolutely murderous run over the previous nine months, and yet he also somehow…has had an underwhelming summer? How can one underwhelm when you’ve just become the 29th man in history to claim the top ranking? Sinner’s 42–4 start to the season would be the envy of any player to pick up a racquet. He won the Australian Open, Miami, Rotterdam, and Halle. He has made deep runs at all majors and beaten every other top player. But as we approach the strange interregnum that is Olympic tennis, and Sinner’s out with illness, his fans must feel sad that he hasn’t gotten to fully enjoy his reign at the top. He hasn’t lived long at the nexus of good form and good bodily fortune.

Physically speaking, Sinner had some endurance issues in the past, and he had yet to prove that he could carry this level of tennis, with this kind of workload, through a whole season. The first scare came at the start of clay season: a right hip injury, never explained in full detail, likely aggravated in Monte-Carlo. After his semifinal loss to Stefanos Tsitsipas, he took five days off without touching a racquet before Madrid. It flared up in his second match, but he played another, got an MRI, didn’t like what he saw, and withdrew from his quarterfinal. Next was a full-on press conference, where he explained to a heartbroken Italian press that he wouldn’t be playing at the country’s flagship tournament in Rome. This is the burden of a world No. 1; now you’ve got to hold a whole press conference to explain why you’re not playing a 1000-level event. But in that conference, Sinner also made a passing remark about not wanting to “throw away years of my career,” which left open the door for dire speculation about the severity of the injury. The Italian writer Emanuele Atturo offered this charming armchair diagnosis of his tortured countrymen: “A widespread, social feeling of anxiety, hypochondria and medical alert on a national scale. His suffering has become ours, at least in the form of phantom pain, of constant thoughts about that hip.”

Leading up to Roland-Garros, it was unclear whether or not Sinner would play; tea leaves were read in Instagram training photos. He showed up to media day and said he was physically fine, just out of match shape, but I didn’t find his words all that convincing. Far more convincing were his first five rounds of flawless victory. Even his eventual loss to Alcaraz was impressive, in its way, as both of them labored through cramps and dull patches—the tour’s twin stars both flickering, then sporadically meeting each other in brilliance. Sinner went up two sets to one, and if he’d closed that out, perhaps we’d be looking at the relative status of these two players quite differently right now. But it was Alcaraz’s day to win in five sets, and he went on to win the next match and claim what is surely the first of many Coupes des Mousquetaires.

But Sinner, a multi-surface threat, got right back to winning as dirt turned to grass. Entering his first-ever tournament as the world No. 1, he won at Halle, even solving the miserable problem of the Hubert Hurkacz serve on grass. At Wimbledon, he nimbly danced through a challenging draw. Nobody wants round 2 Matteo Berrettini on a lawn; Sinner understood the task, played three immaculate tiebreaks, and seized the win over his friend. Big-serving Ben Shelton was a straight-sets exit in round 4. Only in the quarterfinal against Daniil Medvedev did Sinner’s body begin to fail him. Some of this is due to Medvedev’s own dark designs, as he dragged Sinner into pulverizing rallies of 24 shots and 32 shots in the first-set tiebreak alone. But partly it’s just bad luck. Sinner explained later that he’d woken up ill that morning, and we could all see the evidence in his ashen complexion, visible discomfort, and the peculiar 11-minute break in the third set after the physio recommended that he leave the court due to dizziness. Sinner returned to make a five-setter of it, but not at his full power, and he later said he was frustrated to see his good tennis waylaid by illness. “It’s tough, because I was feeling the ball in a very positive way,” he said. “It’s a tough one to swallow.”

The world was deprived of another Sincaraz matchup; Alcaraz went on to win a second consecutive major. Afterward, displaying a level of humility bordering on dishonesty, he continued to call Sinner the best player of the season. It would have been wonderful to see them match up at the Olympics, back on the same clay where they played their last nasty five-setter. But on Tuesday we heard the first murmurs out of Italy that Sinner had yet to travel to Paris for the Games, due to a non-COVID illness, and on Wednesday Sinner announced that he would be skipping the Olympics completely due to tonsillitis, per doctor’s advice. Things turn so quickly. At one point in the late afternoon of June 7, Sinner was a set away from putting away his rival, and four sets from evening the Slam count at two apiece. Instead, Alcaraz ran up the score four to one by taking Roland-Garros and Wimbledon, and lands in Paris as the prohibitive favorite to win the gold medal, while Sinner is (I hope) at home eating soothing ice cream. He’s still got the No. 1 ranking for now, but I bet he would happily trade it in for any one of those three precious chunks of metal.