The tennis world number one, Jannik Sinner, progressed to the final of the 2024 US Open despite the valiant effort of Britain’s Jack Draper, vomited multiple times at the Arthur Ashe Stadium on September 6.
Sinner won 7-5, 7-6 (7-3) and 6-2 to progress through in a turgid affair full of testing conditions for the two athletes as Draper battled sickness whilst the Italian suffered a wrist injury.
Staff rushed to clean the court during a changeover following the 22-year-old Draper’s bodily expulsion with temperatures running in the high 70s Fahrenheit whilst humidity hit 60 percent in New York.
“It’s the worst feeling ever,” Draper said via Tennis.com of throwing up. “You can’t move around the court when that happens.”
At the end of it all, Sinner proved to be able to weather the conditions better as the world number 25 looked drained in the final set where the Italian simply took over and routinely won to reach the second Grand Slam final of his career.
“It was a very physical match, as we see,” said Sinner of the conditions and his injury. “I just tried to stay there mentally.”
He will face Taylor Fritz after the American won his match-up against Frances Tiafoe in five sets to make the final at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, which will take place on Sunday, September 8 with first serve anticipated for 14:00 ET/11:00 PT.
The 23-year-old Sinner is now poised with an excellent chance to take his second ever Grand Slam title and first at the US Open in a tournament that saw Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz and Serbia’s Novak Djokovic dumped out early.
Sinner’s controversial 2024
Sinner came into the tournament with the threat of serious sporting sin hanging over his head following failed two doping tests in March but fortunately found himself cleared of all allegations one week before the start of the 2024 US Open.
He failed two tests for anabolic steroids, commonly used as a spray to treat open wounds, although it is marked with a DOPING indicator for athletes as well as a warning in Sinner’s Italian language.
It was the same drug that saw the San Diego Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr. banned for 80 baseball games in 2022 but eventually, International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) permitted him to compete.
That’s because the ingestion method was via a massage from his physiotherapist, Giacomo Naldi who had applied the clostebol steroid to a personal injury he sustained before working on Sinner without gloves, deemed to be a mistake.
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