Sinner pulls out of Paris Masters after playing at 2am in controversial schedule
Jannik Sinner has withdrawn from the Rolex Paris Masters citing “fatigue” after finishing his opening-round match at 2:37am local time in the early hours of Thursday. The No 4 seed was due to return in the last match of Thursday’s day session to take on Alex de Minaur but has been forced to pull out following minimal recovery time. A number of Sinner’s rivals have already slammed the ATP for the scheduling in Paris.
Sinner’s opening match at the Paris Masters caused a storm when he took to the court after midnight local time and defeated Mackenzie McDonald 6-7(6) 7-5 6-1 with the match finishing shortly before 3am. The Italian was scheduled as the second of two matches in Wednesday’s night session.
Under the Paris Masters schedule, the night session begins at 7:30pm local time. But the four-match day session only finished at 9:56pm on Wednesday, meaning the night session didn’t get underway for another 30 minutes with Holger Rune and Dominic Thiem first up.
Defending champion Rune got the job done in 91 minutes before Sinner and McDonald took to the court, contesting a two-hour and 16-minute battle. Thursday’s schedule had already been released hours before the pair played their match, with the winner set to return in the last of the four day session matches, expected to be at around 5pm local time.
And it caused an uproar, with Sinner’s colleagues and his own coach slamming the ATP for the way the matches had been arranged. “2:45am. Happy for the @janniksin win but zero care for the players welfare with the Paris schedule,” coach Darren Cahill wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of himself and the Sinner camp, also tagging the ATP Tour.
World No 8 Casper Ruud took to X (formerly known as Twitter) on Thursday morning to hit out after seeing that Sinner was set to compete in the day session. The three-time Major finalist wrote: “Bravo @atptour.
“Way to help one of the best players in the world recover and be as ready as possible when he finished his previous match at 2:37 am this morning. 14,5 hours to recover.. what a joke.”
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