It could happen at the Australian Open, where Sinner just cruised into the fourth round with a rousing 6-0, 6-1, 6-3 thump of Argentina’s Sebastian Baez.

Spend a few minutes watching Sinner play, and it becomes obvious why the 6-foot-2 right-hander is ascendant. He plays an athletic, aggressive game, with the sort of rangy power that’s a nightmare to cope with. He’s quick and fluid on hard courts like the ones in Melbourne, where he’ll slide around the baseline, take chances rushing the net, and generally make life miserable from both the forehand and backhand sides.

He’s also a thumper. At this level, every player hits hard. Sinner hits harder. Andre Agassi is a name that comes up as a comparison, but Sinner’s lanky wingspan makes him feel like his own, fresh deal.

“He has just this extra gear,” a Sinner opponent, Finland’s Emil Ruusuvuori, said last year.

Tennis fans are bullish on Sinner because he’s already shown he can hang with the tour’s elite. He owns a winning record (4-3) against his fellow phenom, Carlos Alcaraz. The two have had their share of epics, including an after-midnight quarterfinal at the 2022 U.S. Open which Alcaraz won in five sets. Sinner is also riding a three-match winning streak against No. 3 Daniil Medvedev, after losing the first six times they met.

Meanwhile, Sinner has proven himself to be competitive with tennis’s active Big Three legend: Novak Djokovic. The world No. 1 from Serbia stopped Sinner at last year’s ATP Finals, held before a Sinner-crazed crowd in Turin, but Sinner beat Djokovic in an earlier group-stage match.

Sinner then turned around and beat Djokovic at the Davis Cup, saving three match points as Sinner’s Italian team prevailed over Serbia in the semis, and then defeated Australia to win Italy’s first Cup since 1976.

It was a wild rush to finish out the season. Sinner enters 2024 on a remarkable heater.“We say this is the hunting year,” Sinner told me in a telephone conversation the other day.

“Every tournament, we go to, trying to hunt, and see what we can get,” he continued. “Maybe you go out with nothing, and sometimes you go out with something. Let’s see.”

Sinner is humble about his development, and is the first to point out the gap on his résumé. He has yet to win a major. He hasn’t even made a major final (his best result is a semifinal at Wimbledon last year). Alcaraz has already won two majors. Medvedev’s got one. Djokovic has won, uh…24, the all-time most.

That’s some brutal competition, but Sinner’s recent breakthroughs have given him faith. “For sure, it gives you confidence,” he said of his battles with Djokovic, whom he could face in the semifinals in Australia. “But I also know I can improve many things.”

Sinner didn’t specialize early in tennis. Born among the Dolomites in the northern region of South Tyrol, Sinner grew up skiing, and began collecting junior championships as a child. He was also keen on soccer. Tennis lagged behind until Sinner began focusing on the sport in his early teens.

I wanted to know: What could a background in skiing give to a professional tennis player?

Fearlessness, Sinner said.

“In skiing, you go down as fast as possible, and you can also hurt yourself,” he said. Tennis, while not without physical risk, is less dangerous, and so, “you play fearless. You have a lot of respect for everyone, but you don’t have to be scared.”

Sinner is glad he played multiple sports. Not focusing on a single discipline kept the pressure off, he said. When it was time to choose tennis, he made sure he enjoyed it.

“You have to enjoy the ride,” he said. “You have to have the right company, which makes the ride feel even more appreciated.”

We should definitely mention Sinner’s company, which includes coach Darren Cahill, who’s worked with everyone from Agassi to Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Murray, and also Sinner’s father, Hanspeter, a longtime chef. We should add that Sinner’s already landed some stylish sponsors, including Gucci, which has made him tournament bags and led to an eccentric GQ short film.

But I really want to get to the Carota Boys, a gaggle of Italians from Piedmont who have followed Sinner to multiple tournaments, and have now turned up in Melbourne to cheer and sing at his matches (Olé! Olé! Olé! Olé! Sinner! Sinner!) They wear carrot costumes—a wink to their idol’s hair and occasional in-tournament snack—and they have become such a social-media phenomenon they had their own press conference as the tournament began.

“They’re getting more famous than I am,” Sinner said at his own press conference.

“We greatly admire [Jannik’s] humility and simplicity,” Carota Boys member Alessandro Dedominici wrote to me in an email. “He has great values and principles, like friends and family, like us. And now that we’ve had an opportunity to get to know him, we can tell you he’s also very very funny.”

This might be the advantage Djokovic and Alcaraz cannot compete with, in Australia and onward. Jannik Sinner has all the talent to win a major, but he’s yet to crack through. He’s still waiting for that moment that makes him a tennis household name.

But he’s the only guy with singing carrots.