Alexander Zverev: two majors in three months, and the one rival he still cannot beat

Alexander Zverev

Photo: Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 20, 1997 Hamburg
Occupation	Tennis Player
Awards	ATP Tour Awards · German Sportspersonality of the Year

Until the last point of the US Open final, the line most often quoted back at Alexander Zverev was one he had supplied himself, into a microphone in Melbourne, holding a runner-up plate: “I’m just not good enough. It’s as simple as that.” He had lost three major finals by then, the first of them from two sets up. The sentence has expired. Zverev won Roland Garros and the US Open inside three months, then flew to London and won the match that clinched the Laver Cup for Europe. What the trophies have not done is close the two questions that walk into every press room with him: whether he can beat Jannik Sinner, and how to read the accusations against him that ended without a verdict either way.

His story starts as a Soviet one and lands in Hamburg. His parents, Irina Zvereva and Alexander Zverev Sr., were both ranked players for the Soviet Union, trained at the army-run CSKA club in Moscow and were kept at home by a state that rarely let its athletes travel. As the Soviet Union came apart, a tournament trip to Germany turned into a coaching job at Hamburg’s Uhlenhorster club, and they stayed. Their second son was born in the city almost a decade after his brother Mischa, who would also play on the tour.

That son, Alexander, arrived in April 1997. At home he was Sascha, the Russian diminutive; at 20 he asked the public to call him Alexander, saying he was born in Germany and considers himself German. His mother built the technique. The backhand that opponents now rank among the best in the sport is, in his words, “100 percent down to my mum”, while his father supplied what Zverev called “a very Soviet way” of physical training. He became junior world No. 1 and won the boys’ title at the Australian Open in 2014.

The senior game arrived almost at once. He won a Challenger event at 17, beat Roger Federer on grass in Halle while still a teenager and, in 2017, won two Masters 1000 titles and climbed to No. 3 at the age of 20. A year later he beat Federer and Novak Djokovic on consecutive days in London to win the ATP Finals. Much of the sport filed him as the heir in waiting.

The majors refused the script. At the 2020 US Open, in an Arthur Ashe Stadium with no crowd, he led Dominic Thiem by two sets and lost the final in a fifth-set tiebreak. He took Olympic gold in Tokyo the next summer, beating Djokovic on the way, added a second ATP Finals title that November and reached No. 2 in June 2022, days after tearing ligaments in his ankle during a Roland Garros semifinal against Rafael Nadal and leaving Court Philippe-Chatrier in a wheelchair. The comeback ended in two more lost finals: Carlos Alcaraz beat him in five sets in Paris in 2024, and Sinner beat him in straight sets in Melbourne in 2025.

No account of Zverev is honest without the part that has nothing to do with his forehand. In 2020 his former girlfriend Olga Sharypova accused him of physical and emotional abuse in reporting by the journalist Ben Rothenberg. Zverev denied it, and in 2023 an investigation commissioned by the ATP closed without action, citing insufficient evidence. A second case followed. Berlin prosecutors pursued him over alleged bodily harm to Brenda Patea, his former partner and the mother of his daughter. He contested a penalty order, which took the case to a public trial, and in June 2024 the court discontinued the proceedings after an out-of-court agreement with Patea, on condition that he pay 200,000 euros to the state and to charity. There was no finding of guilt and no admission, and he has always denied the allegations. The legal file is closed; the public one never quite was, and the ATP drew criticism for seating him on its Players Advisory Council while the charge was pending. His temper has its own record too, a default in Acapulco in 2022 for hammering an umpire’s chair with his racket.

Then came 2026. It opened with a five-hour, five-set semifinal defeat to Alcaraz in Melbourne. By reaching the semifinals at Indian Wells he became the first man outside the Big Four to have played the last four at all nine Masters 1000 events, yet Sinner beat him there, in Miami, in Monte-Carlo and in the Madrid final. In Paris, with Alcaraz out injured and both Sinner and Djokovic beaten early, he was named favourite and spent the fortnight declining the label. He beat Flavio Cobolli 6-1 in the fifth set of the final.

The record books needed several lines. No German man had won Roland Garros since Henner Henkel in 1937, and none had won any major since Boris Becker in 1996. Zverev, who has lived with type 1 diabetes since early childhood, also became the first man with the condition to win one. On Chatrier, the court where he had been carried off with a ruined ankle, he said he had lived “the best moments of my life” and “the worst moment of my life” on that clay.

Wimbledon returned the other half of the argument. He reached his first final there, won a first-set tiebreak and lost in four sets to Sinner, the Italian’s tenth straight win over him. In New York, seeded first with Sinner absent, he stood two points from a first-round defeat against Lorenzo Sonego, then did not drop a set from the third round to the semifinals. He beat Ben Shelton 6-3, 7-6, 5-7, 6-2 to become the first German man to win the US Open since Becker in 1989. “We went 30 years without winning a Grand Slam title, and then won two in the span of three months,” he said. He finished 25-2 at the majors.

Away from the tour he lives in Monte Carlo. His daughter, Mayla, was born in 2021, and his partner is the German television presenter and actress Sophia Thomalla, who sat in his box in Paris and New York. He kept his diabetes private until 2022, when he disclosed it and launched a foundation for people living with the condition.

This week he arrived in Beijing as top seed at the China Open, a title he has never won, with Djokovic in his quarter. The ranking is the business left over. He trails Sinner by 1,810 points with Paris and the ATP Finals in Turin still to come and far fewer points to defend, a real route to becoming the 30th man to hold No. 1. The arithmetic allows him to get there without beating Sinner. The sport will keep asking him to do it anyway.

Tags: sports, athletes, tennis, US Open, tennis players, Jannik Sinner, Alexander Zverev, French Open, Laver Cup

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