Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are out of the French Open. Their influence on tennis remains

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PARIS — Carlos Alcaraz couldn’t make it to the start line of the 2026 French Open, felled by a wrist injury.

Jannik Sinner succumbed to some ill health and baking heat in the second round.

But the two best players in men’s tennis, who have been redefining its terms of brilliance for some time despite their youth, are living on through their tennis children. In their absence, it is much easier to see what they have wrought.

There’s João Fonseca, 19, the boy from Brazil who showed Novak Djokovic, the 39-year-old GOAT, that he can lash the ball one moment and caress it the next. There’s Rafael Jódar, the same age as Fonseca, jumping over the baseline to launch a two-handed backhand return in mid-air with Sinner’s pounce and sweeping into the front of the court with Alcaraz’s fearlessness.

And there, two years younger, is Alcaraz and Sinner’s most direct descendant yet. Moïse Kouame, the 17-year-old Frenchman. Witness the compact, stretchy forehand and the locked-wrist backhand with a followthrough that seems to extend into the crowd. See the movement and the power out of the sharpest corners of the court. See the ability to turn defense into attack, and to make neutral look dangerous. See the drop shot.

And perhaps, see the future. Their styles of play are their own, but this trio at the tip of the spear for the next generation of men’s tennis that is suddenly coming for the sport is also a collective of Sinnercaraz descendants. They play fast and fearlessly, just like the still-young-but-slightly less-so stars who created the blueprint that they are following.

“My role model in tennis when I was younger, it was Rafael Nadal,” Spain’s Jódar said in a news conference after prevailing over another young gun, 21-year-old American Alex Michelsen, in five sets Friday.

“Then in the last few years before I turned pro, I could say probably Carlos Alcaraz.”

This is how it is for so many of the new ones. They adorned their bedroom walls with posters of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic — though Kouame said he was more of a Petra Kvitová guy.

Then, when tennis got serious for them and they got within striking distance of the top of the tour, they looked to the way that Sinner and Alcaraz have staged a fast-moving takeover of tennis.

In most realms, the difference between how a 25- or 27-year-old and a 21-year-old has learned his craft is surmountable, something that can be accounted for with some retroactive understanding. In men’s tennis the past few years, the difference has become a chasm that players who were on court with the Big Three, instead of watching them on TV, have so far failed to bridge.

Félix Auger-Aliassime, 25, and Casper Ruud, 27, have spoken about how the sport has shifted on them in the middle of their careers. They grew up trying to master the calculus of Federer-Nadal-Djokovic point construction. That involved the art of tennis chess, hitting six or eight or shots to set up the one that finishes the point.

It sent them climbing to the upper echelon of the sport. There was a twinge of disruption, because Alexander Zverev (29) and Daniil Medvedev (30) introduced a blend of unreturnable serving and baseline dexterity that briefly forced even the Big Three to patch their software. But it mostly worked.

Then came Sinner and Alcaraz. Sinner with his changes of direction that turned neutral rallies into traps. Alcaraz with his sweeping north-south movement and crush-and-rush bravery. Both of them with groundstrokes that they have refined to detonate the ball when dictating and to deflect it when defending. And both of them with the ability and desire to defend and scramble, and the hunger to attack at the first opportunity without letting a perfect ball be the enemy of the good.

“The defense also has become not just defense,” Auger-Aliassime said in a recent interview. “You’ll play Carlos and Jannik and you’re coming to the net and if you don’t approach really well, they might hit a passing shot that you don’t really have a play on. The speed is so much faster. You need to be so much more precise with that speed to put the opponent in a difficult position.”

Fonseca, Jódar and Kouame have plenty of company in various phases of their development. Wednesday afternoon, Jakub Menšík, 20, was writhing on the clay, paralyzed by full-body cramps and dehydration at the end of a five-set win over Argentina’s Mariano Navone in the searing Paris heat.

On Friday, he returned, slowly at first, then all at once, to pummel, Alex de Minaur, the 27-year-old Energizer bunny who figured to be a heavy favorite, given what Menšík had been through and de Minaur’s experience.

Learner Tien, 20, saved match points and came back from a set down in his second-round match. The effort in the Paris swelter appeared to drain him and contribute to a lackluster showing against Flavio Cobolli of Italy, who beat him three sets.

His buddy Alex Michelsen, 21, had the misfortune of running into Jóar. At least he went down to one of his own. Spain’s got another young gun besides Jódar, Martín Landaluce, 20, who registered two five-set wins in the first week, and fell two points short of winning a third.

After losing Sunday in a third consecutive marathon, Landaluce said in a mixed zone that he knew he could hang with the players he wants to surpass. That’s a common thread among this group.

“All the young guys coming up, they want to prove themselves,” Tien said in a news conference after his second-round win.

“I think a lot of the guys coming up really have a lot of belief in themselves that they belong at this level, and that they can challenge the top guys for these events. I think just believing is a huge first step, and I think a lot of these younger guys, myself included, are just very eager to go out and prove themselves.”

This is how Michelsen sized up the situation.

“It just seems like they’re all capable of pretty much everything on the tennis court,” he during an interview.

“They don’t have a lot of weaknesses. They’re moving great, serving good. Both wings are good, and that description fits a lot of people like Jódar, Menšík, Fonseca, Learner. Our whole group is very well rounded, and we had the privilege of watching the greats growing up and kind of realizing what we need to do to be a professional tennis player.”

Their artillery is proof of concept.

Fonseca’s topspin forehand averages more than 3,000 revolutions per minute (RPM). He hits it at 81 mph, 3 mph faster and nearly 200 RPMs more than the average tour player, according to Courtside Advantage, which tracks the velocity and placement of every shot on the ATP Tour.

Jódar’s topspin forehand averages 81 mph and 3,150 RPMs. All that spin allows them to hunt chances to take advantage of their power, putting opponents on their heels and backpedaling deep behind the court.

Their backhands are harder, too, and they clear the net at a lower trajectory than the tour average. That can create the sense that the ball is coming at the opponent even faster.  Sometimes all they need to see is a ball that bounces slightly higher than the top of the net, because that gives them a chance to hit down on the ball, even if they are standing several feet behind the baseline.

Jódar said that while he modeled his game on Alcaraz’s, he has tried to make it his own.

“I’m an aggressive player who likes to dominate the points, but I think here on clay, you know, you have to defend a little bit more. So I am trying to develop that game as well,” Jódar said in a news conference after the win over Michelsen. “I’m now trying to develop all my weak points, like, for example, the forehand, the serve, the return. I think those are things that I still have to develop.”

Fonseca gave himself a similar review after his win over Djokovic. He went down two sets, an insurmountable lead for Djokovic but for one other time in his career. But then he evolved into something like the apotheosis of a next-generation player. By the fifth set, he was setting his feet and lashing the ball into wide open spaces, and Djokovic could only watch them whizz by.

Fonseca hit hard, but not too close to the line.

“Aggressive with margin,” he said in a news conference. “Became a little bit more solid and conducting a little bit more the points.”

More aggressiveness. More consistency. More command, especially on the first shot after his serve, the all-important “plus-one” shot, even when arguably the best returner in the history of the sport is the one returning.

As the match stretched into the fourth hour, Fonseca had the other advantage that youth often brings: Young legs with more gas in the tank. He could sense Djokovic tiring.

“That gave me more hope to keep finding the solutions,” Fonseca said.

Find them he did. He will get another shot to turn future promise into success now on Sunday, when he takes on Ruud. Jödar faces Pablo Carreño Busta, who is 34. Menšík plays Andrey Rublev, another of Ruud’s generation.

Three battles between tennis generations, with the young ones growing up faster all the time.