\u201cI was very, very flat, you know, the whole body. I don\u2019t remember [the] last time I felt this weak.<\/p>\n
\u201cI woke up this morning, didn\u2019t feel very well and tried to keep the points very short. In the beginning I was hitting very clean, very good, and then I just kind of hit the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sinner revealed he began to fade halfway through the third set as temperatures once again climbed above 30C during a record-breaking heatwave in France.<\/p>\n
But he refused to blame the conditions for his unexpected exit, his earliest at a Grand Slam since he lost at the same stage here in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was warm, but not crazy warm,\u201d said Sinner. \u201cReally it was nothing against the heat, nothing against the weather. It was just me today, but it happens.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to take anything away from him [Cerundolo]. He played a very solid match.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sinner arrived in Paris on the back of winning all three of the clay-court Masters titles, with his odds of completing a career Grand Slam enhanced further by the absence of injured rival Carlos Alcaraz.<\/p>\n
Instead, it was another bitterly disappointing ending at Roland Garros for last year\u2019s runner-up, who held three championship points 12 months ago before losing to Alcaraz.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s tough to accept because of the position I\u2019ve been in and everything considered, but yeah, now I have a lot of time to recover,\u201d said Sinner.<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t play any tournament on grass before [Wimbledon]. Now I need, really, some time off, recover completely, also mentally, and then be ready to go again.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I said, in the beginning of the year, this [the French Open] is my main goal here. A very early exit, it was not what I was looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Cerundolo, who goes on to play Martin Landaluce or Vit Kopriva in the last 32, it was just the third Grand Slam match win of his career.<\/p>\n
The Buenos Aires native didn\u2019t blink as Sinner tried to gamely hang on, Cerundolo putting away the struggling top seed to pull off a monumental upset.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s tough for him [Sinner]. I think I was a little bit lucky,\u201d said Cerundolo.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m super happy. I\u2019m going to keep trying to play my best. It\u2019s a tournament I really like to play, clay is my best surface.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI was very, very flat, you know, the whole body. I don\u2019t remember [the] last time I felt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[74,9526,34593,229074,17400,5506,18089,22397,149310,11775,226427,12232,33920,135771,111,139,69,5493,6943,229075,226426,13744,12233,213,24994,31145,6378,107499,1961,61,377,379],"class_list":["post-449916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-after","tag-another","tag-argentinas","tag-cerundolo","tag-collapse","tag-defeat","tag-dramatic","tag-favourite","tag-fiveset","tag-french","tag-garros","tag-jannik","tag-juan","tag-manuel","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-open","tag-paris","tag-redhot","tag-roland","tag-shock","tag-sinner","tag-sports","tag-sudden","tag-suffered","tag-suffers","tag-sweltering","tag-this","tag-to","tag-world","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}