CTC Short: The Biggest Stories in the tennis world live from Beijing!

Dan Kiernan (0:00)

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That's sototennis.com/tennisathlete, because physical preparation is one of the biggest controllables that you have.

Hi, you guys. Just coming to you here from Beijing.

Thought we're gonna just try something a little different, a big welcome to Control the Controllables. Wanna give you guys a little bit of an update on the tennis world of things that are going on as ever. A very active week. Lots and lots of things happening again this week. And I wanna start actually with over in Tokyo, where we had a few things happening, but we had Kei Nishikori playing his final match in front of the Japanese crowd. Tough draw playing against Francis Tiafor in that first round match. And just a big shout out to him really and what an incredible career he's had. I mean, I believe the first Japanese player to ever make a Grand Slam final back in 2014 maybe.

He also, a little one for you on Nishikori, he's actually the third best win ratio in three sets behind Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, 72.5%.

So how about that one? That's a little bit of a one for you to get your heads around. And then also we of course had Carlos Alcaraz. I think we all saw him coming back in New York and it was just for tennis, just to have Carlos Alcaraz coming back. It was exciting. It was exciting in New York and I'm sure it was exciting in Tokyo as well. And you know what, he took the title, Leheka in the final. And it's so good to see Carlos Alcaraz back on the tour, back to winning ways. He's announced that he's going to play a pretty strong schedule. I know he's playing Shanghai. He's going to play in Paris.

We're going to be seeing them at the end of the finals and incredibly exciting to have him with us back in the tennis world as well. But we won't see his four, his rival, the one that's 44-3 on the year. Jannik Sinner, we kept thinking, will we see him? Will he be back? Well, I guess the answer is no. He's not going to be back. He's announced that his year's ended. There's cynical people out there that say there's things that need to be looked in. I think where there's, after what happened to him last year with his drug ban, I think that's automatically where some people's minds go.

But certainly, we'd like to see maybe a bit of transparency. It would be great to understand what is happening with Jannik Sinner. Clearly not right. Knee injury. You know, has he had surgery? Is he having surgery? You know, certainly a bit of a worry for Jannik Sinner fans that we kept seeing him practice. We kept thinking he was going to come back, but he hasn't come back. And he's now called it a day for the full year of 2026 Will we see him back in 2027? Will we see him back in Australia? But that's obviously big, big news coming out of the tennis world. Here in Beijing, we had a couple of big stories and there's still lots to go. The event you can see here on the centre court here, Gaby Dabrowski and Luisa Stefani will be playing. Actually that's Rani and Paolini there, our opponents later today warming up. I'm not spying, I promise. But later on tonight, I'll be playing on this beautiful court in Beijing. And I had the pleasure of sitting up there somewhere as I watched, whether you like it or not, the greatest male tennis player of all time, Novak Djokovic, the best ever and the longest win streak out of any tournament on the men's side anywhere in the world. 34-0, he is now in Beijing. Seven titles, hasn't played here for 11 years.