PARIS — Jannik Sinner walked onto Court Philippe-Chatrier as the most untouchable man in tennis and walked off it broken, beaten and a full year further from the one trophy he wants most. The world No. 1 led two sets to love, sat a single game from the third round, then watched it all dissolve in the Paris heat as Argentina’s Juan Manuel Cerundolo stormed back to win 3-6, 2-6, 7-5, 6-1, 6-1 on Thursday in the biggest upset of the 2026 French Open.
Sinner had won the first two sets in under 90 minutes and surged ahead 5-1 in the third. He was serving for the match, twice, with the kind of lead that does not slip in the modern game. Then it slipped. The 24-year-old Italian dropped 15 straight points, grabbed at his back before a serve, and began the slow physical unraveling that would hand a 56th-ranked opponent the win of his career.
The temperature on Chatrier started at 84 degrees and climbed toward 91 as the afternoon wore on, according to reports. Sinner reached for a hand-held fan on changeovers and packed ice around his neck. At 5-4 in the third, down 0-40, he left the court for an off-court medical timeout, and the conversation with the chair umpire carried over the broadcast, Sinner asking whether he was even allowed to take it. He returned, but he was, in every sense that mattered, finished.
Cerundolo did not flinch. He saved all eight break points he faced over the final two sets, dragged Sinner corner to corner, and leaned on drop shots to punish a man who could no longer chase. The Argentine claimed 18 of the last 20 games. By the closing stretch the only question left inside the stadium was not whether Cerundolo could hold on but what exactly was happening to the best player in the world.
“Of course, it’s tough for him, he was leading the match,” Cerundolo said in his on-court interview. “I couldn’t win more than three games by set, so I think I was a little bit lucky. I feel sorry for him because he deserved to win a lot of matches and, of course, he was serving to win this match.” It was Cerundolo’s first win over a top-10 player, and it carried him into the third round of a major for the first time.
The numbers around the defeat are staggering. Sinner arrived in Paris on a 30-match winning streak dating to February, an 18-0 record on clay in 2026, and a sweep of all five clay Masters 1000 titles. He had not lost since the winter. He became the first top-seeded man to fall in the round of 64 at Roland Garros since Andre Agassi in 2000, and 2026 became the first edition in which both the world No. 1 and world No. 2 failed to reach the third round in Paris.
For Sinner, the sting runs deeper than a single result. Roland Garros is the only major missing from his collection, and a title here would have made him just the seventh man in the Open Era to complete the career Grand Slam. The path looked clear. Carlos Alcaraz, the two-time defending champion who beat Sinner in last year’s final after the Italian held three championship points, withdrew from the tournament with a right wrist injury, leaving the draw wide open. The Eastern Herald earlier detailed how Sinner’s career Grand Slam bid and the wide-open Paris draw had recast him as the overwhelming favorite, a status that now reads as cruel.
Heat has undone Sinner before. At this year’s Australian Open he cramped in a third-round match against Eliot Spizzirri, but the roof closed under the tournament’s heat rule and he regrouped to win in four. There was no roof to save him on Chatrier, no second gear to find. Former world No. 4 Tim Henman, speaking on TNT Sports, called it one of the biggest Grand Slam upsets in many years, noting that Sinner had taken 18 of 20 games one way before surrendering nearly the same run the other.
Cerundolo, the lowest-ranked man to beat a reigning No. 1 at Roland Garros since 1998, will next face the winner of Vit Kopriva and Martin Landaluce. The official tournament organizers, in their match report, detailed how the Argentine, ranked 56th in the world, had never before tasted a result remotely this large. Highlights of the collapse spread within minutes.
The exit reshapes the entire men’s draw. For the first time since the 2023 US Open, a Grand Slam will be won by someone other than Sinner or Alcaraz, who between them have taken the last nine majors. Sinner leaves Paris with a 37-3 record on the year and his earliest French Open exit since 2023, his career mark in five-set matches dropping to 6-12, per early reporting. He arrived chasing history and departs nursing the kind of defeat that lingers, the second straight year his Roland Garros has ended in a five-set heartbreak on the same court.
Sinner is far from the only top seed already gone. The Eastern Herald reported on Daniil Medvedev’s first-round collapse against a wildcard earlier in the week, part of a brutal opening stretch in Paris that has thinned the men’s field and left the title genuinely up for grabs. As coverage has noted, the heat has dogged players across both draws all week, and on Thursday it claimed the biggest name of all.
