Nick Kyrgios: The Donald Trump of Tennis

In mid-August, a few days before the US Open kicked off, it was revealed that the number one in the men’s world ranking and the eventual winner of the tournament, Jannik Sinner of Italy, had left two positive doping tests earlier this year. During and shortly after a tournament the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) tournament in Indian Wells in March, Sinner had microscopic quantities of the steroid clostebol in his blood. This is how Sinner and his team explained it: Sinner’s physio, Giacomo Naldi, had treated a cut on his hand with a spray provided by Sinner’s fitness coach Umberto Ferrara. The spray contained clostebol, a fairly common ingredient in over-the-counter medication in Italy. Through cracks in Sinner’s skin, infinitesimal amounts of the steroid, with no possible effect on his performance, entered his system.

The tests had not been made public by the ATP while they were investigated by the independent International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA). Only when the ITIA report was published in August did the case become known to the public. In the report, three medical experts agreed that the explanation provided by Sinner’s team was plausible. Therefore, Sinner wasn’t banned and allowed to carry on playing.

The report is available to everyone online. Whoever reads it, will find the findings hard to doubt. All the facts add up. An ad hominem defense of Sinner wasn’t needed, although numerous colleagues and tennis experts declared that the Italian, one of the fairest players on the ATP tour, was an extremely unlikely cheater. When, after his semifinal loss to Sinner at the US Open, Jack Draper of Great Britain was asked about Sinner’s greatest weakness, he said: “Maybe he’s too nice.”

One player who doesn’t think so is the Australian enfant terrible Nick Kyrgios. Right after Sinner’s positive tests had been announced, Kyrgios took to his favorite outlet, X, calling for a two-year ban and questioning the theory of the “massage cream,” although no one ever claimed that any massage cream was involved. During the US Open, Kyrgios carried on with negative comments about Sinner, which culminated in a sarcastic “We are witnessing greatness!” after Sinner’s victory. That, however, was nothing compared to a post on X a day prior, in which Kyrgios captioned a picture of himself and former girlfriend Anna Kalinskaya with the words “Second serve.” What seems cryptic turns gross when we appreciate who Kalinskaya’s current boyfriend is: Jannik Sinner.

Kyrgios, who hasn’t been playing professional tennis for over a year due to a knee injury, rarely misses an opportunity to turn the spotlight his way. The lowest of blows will do. During a match against Stan Wawrinka in 2015, Kyrgios told his opponent that another Aussie player, Thanasi Kokkinakis, had “banged” Wawrinka’s girlfriend. Kyrgios has, in the past, also spoken fondly of celebrity misogynist Andrew Tate (whom he finally distanced himself from when Tate was under police investigation for human trafficking), and, in 2021, he admitted to having assaulted a former lover.

Kyrgios rages even when women are out of the picture. After he was disqualified in a match against Casper Ruud in 2019 for throwing a chair, he declared that he’d “rather watch paint dry” than Ruud play tennis. (Ruud has been ranked as highly as number two in the world.) Kyrgios has celebrated opponents’ double faults and shows little concern for sportsmanship overall. During one of his many outbursts against tennis officials, he called seasoned umpire Fergus Murphy “a potato with legs and arms.” He also regularly gets into altercations with spectators.

He himself, of course, is thin-skinned. When he learned that Toni Nadal, the uncle and longtime coach of Rafael Nadal, one of the biggest players of the game ever, had strongly defended Jannik Sinner in the Spanish daily El Pais, Kyrgios sullenly asked on X whether anyone believed that Toni Nadal had defended him in the same way. Well, maybe not. One reason, of course, might be that Kyrgios called Toni Nadal an “idiot,” when the latter questioned whether Kyrgios’s theatrics were good for the sport. In 2019, Kyrgios declared that there was no reason to apologize for a shot taken at Rafael during a Wimbledon encounter because “I wanted to hit him square in the chest.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Self-centeredness? An overblown ego? Little interest in facts? Turning rudeness into a trademark? Ignorance into a virtue? Being raucous for the sake of it? Celebrating chauvinism? Playing the victim? That’s right, it’s all very Trumpian and characteristic of the far right of today.

The saddest thing about it? Instead of leaving the likes of Kyrgios to their online echo chambers, mainstream media eagerly provides a platform for them and their “controversies.” Just like they helped turn a maniac into a successful presidential candidate, they are giving credibility to Kyrgios’s blows of hot air, suggesting that he has legitimate stakes in the offensive nonsense he is spouting. But he doesn’t. Kyrgios does not make arguments, only noise. He doesn’t respond to critics either. Instead, he’ll claim that he’s being bullied or that social media has too much power. Go figure. Nonetheless, both the BBC, ESPN, Eurosport, and other prominent media networks have hired Kyrgios as an expert commentator. He is one of the featured players in the Netflix series Break Point, and during the US Open he was allowed to do on-court interviews.

Should Kyrgios be banned from all these activities, as some demand? People can hire the  commentators they want, I suppose. But in this case they certainly have to accept responsibility for normalizing a culture that we thought we’d left behind. Do they care? Probably not. Ratings outweigh all else.

People who like Kyrgios often state that he “doesn’t give a fuck” and “says what he thinks.” To some, he is “real,” a “rebel.” I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that, today, we’re confronted with such mind-boggling standards also in the world of sports. It is devastating all the same.