He was a champion junior skier, but at 13 he left home to train at the Piatti Tennis Centre in Bordighera, hundreds of miles away.
“The truth is, as soon as I got there, I started crying,” Sinner told Vanity Fair Italia in 2024 (as translated into English). “I called [my parents] after two hours, and they must have thought, ‘Here, we have to go get him.’ But instead, I told them to stay calm, that everything was fine.”
After winning the 2026 Madrid Open on Mother’s Day, he called mom Siglinde Sinner, who waitressed at a ski lodge when he was a kid, and his dad Hanspeter Sinner, the lodge’s chef, “a true inspiration.”
“I just try to be a little bit like them,” he said during a post-match news conference, “because then I know that I’m a good person.”