Every time I see the media reflexively, almost mechanically, paint Jannik as some kind of cold villain, I cannot help but feel that they themselves appear as machine-like villains. What is even sadder is that some fans take those articles as objective truth and end up judging Jannik as harshly as the most bitter haters do. It seems as if they are convinced that, in order for Carlos to embody every noble quality of humanity as an artist, Jannik must be seen as someone utterly devoid of feeling, beauty, or wonder. It is as if he were playing tennis in the most talentless, malicious, and illegitimate way imaginable.
If you summarize the Guardian’s Roland Garros article, this is exactly what it says. Many Sincaraz fans praised the article and its author, but this is my perspective.
I do not think badly of Carlos for struggling emotionally after his losses at the Olympics and in Cincinnati in 2024. But even after that, people still said, “Carlos accepts defeat better than Jannik does, because he truly enjoys tennis.” It was not just Carlos’s fans. Some Jannik supporters repeated it as well. They compared this year’s Roland Garros and Wimbledon to make their point.
Should I really try to balance this narrative by comparing Carlos’s losses at the Olympics and in Cincinnati with Jannik’s at Roland Garros, and say instead, “Jannik accepts defeat better than Carlos, because he carries himself with more class”?
When I see people warmly embrace amateur psychoanalysis about Wimbledon, claiming that Carlos’s lifeless defeat was the result of his unconscious refusal to keep winning so decisively, simply because doing so would make Jannik look too inferior, I am at a loss for words.
I often wonder how those same people would respond if we applied the same logic to Jannik. Imagine he, branded in the press as a fake No.1 who had unjustly taken Carlos’s spot and faced especially harsh treatment from the crowds at Roland Garros and the US Open, became so mentally exhausted that he subconsciously wanted to give the fans exactly what they expected. According to this logic, he would lose the US Open final without putting up a fight.
To me, both of these interpretations are equally shallow and meaningless.
Please stop tying the two of them together unnecessarily. Almost every comparison turns into a zero-sum game. One side is belittled and painted as lacking or unpleasant, only so the other can be celebrated as something extraordinary. The media pushes that bias as though it were simply objective fact.
The so-called objective fact they rely on that “Jannik likes winning, but Carlos loves tennis itself, and therefore Carlos accepts losing better” is nothing more than a shallow impression masquerading as analysis. Fans need to start acknowledging the bias at play when Wimbledon and Roland Garros are cherry-picked for comparison while the Olympics and Cincinnati are conveniently left out.
yes, a million times yes! (couldn’t find a suitable meme, sorry)
everything is so brilliantly on point.
the journalists etc. refuse to step away from the beautiful and neat and so so well-structured narrative of the ”rivalry” of the two complete opposites, where the better-lively-kind ”opposite” defeats the ”lifelessly perfect”-malevolent ”opposite”, and jannik is kinda assigned a role of a faceless villain written just to be defeated by “the chosen one” time after time, a villain who is not allowed anything human like emotions because god forbid someone would like him and feel empathetic towards him, no, no, he is on the other side of the coin, he is the machine without a soul that must be broken by ”the predestined” whatever.Â
I feel like their story’s already written itself in a way for many people, primarily because we (as in people) generally tend to try to sort the world into certain easy categories and put a label on everything in order to get rid of the complexity.
so yeah they carefully cherry pick the episodes of the ”rivalry” to craft the narrative from, to further prove it. but that's in a way the common trait of the majority of the journalists in every sport (like max verstappen and the evil "mad max" or "the winning machine who does not even care" for instance). and also its so easy to sell this kind of "ideologic" rivalry (like messi v ronaldo, senna v prost etc.), which is once again based on shallow yet loud labels. so so marketable.
also so so so true about the tendency of some ”fans” to engage in, as you remarked, ”amateur psychoanalysis”, that as I believe lies once again in the need to ”decomplexify” the world and the people and find easy and tidy explanation that fits in their outlook to what they see.Â
p. s. caught the chills from this malevolence
