MADRID – The Arthur Ashe Stadium clock shows 12 minutes into the US Open final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. The Spaniard is a break up and leads 40-15 on serve. He has started in top form — a sine qua non condition for him to start getting playful.
At that moment, with Donald Trump still watching from the stands, he delivers a body serve that Sinner can barely return, leaving the ball mid-court. Alcaraz loads his forehand, warning the Italian of the cannon shot that seems imminent. But it’s a trick!
Alcaraz makes a gesture that makes Sinner lean forward. The red-haired player hasn’t fallen for it and reads perfectly that Alcaraz isn’t about to unleash a forehand bomb, but rather a textbook dropshot — his trademark stroke.
However, in a matter of milliseconds, Sinner realises there’s another trick within the first trick. Like magicians who show you their right hand while the real illusion happens with the left.
Bang, bang — in the blink of an eye, Alcaraz leaves Sinner, Trump, and the whole crowd speechless. He wanted Sinner to see him prepare the dropshot, but in fact, he executes a sliced forehand deep into the court.
Watching Carlos Alcaraz hit these disguised drop shots NEVER gets old.
They try to read what he’s doing, but get sent to the other side of the court.pic.twitter.com/7mFHjy5nYL
— Swish 🍒 Tennis (@Zwxsh) January 27, 2025
Sinner, one of the most coordinated players ever to set foot on a tennis court, stumbles. He’s been fooled. He can’t even pretend to chase the ball. The point goes to Alcaraz.
The US Open final wasn’t the first time this trick appeared. Dubbed on social media as the fake dropshot, this move has been part of the Spaniard’s repertoire for quite some time. And there’s no doubt we’ll see it again at the season-ending ATP Finals in Turin, where Alcaraz and Sinner will battle for the year-end No. 1.
“Carlitos, ever since he was very young, always did different things — shots that were completely unusual,” recalls Kiko Navarro, one of his first coaches, who still trains kids at the same academy in El Palmar, the town where the six-time Grand Slam champion was born, in conversation with CLAY.
“I think everything in tennis has already been invented. I don’t think Carlitos has invented anything new, but he does have that touch of genius you see very rarely. I always said it wasn’t normal how good he was at drop shots and volleys even as a kid,” Navarro adds.
“Everything he does now, he did as a child. If you watch videos of him in Tarbes, for example (at the prestigious Les Petits As), he had the same forehand, the same volley, the same ease and quality to do it all. Sure, he’s gained power and refined details, but the base was already there.”
“I remember him doing the fake dropshot, and even though he was very young, he did it so well. People who know him expect the drop because he fakes it, so you move forward to the net. But then he hits that sliced forehand perfectly,” Navarro continues.
And he’s right: there are videos of Alcaraz as a boy pulling off that same fake dropshot, like in a match against his friend Dani Rincón in Lleida when he was only 14.
That helps explain what Antonio Martínez-Cascales, director of Juan Carlos Ferrero’s academy, used to do when Alcaraz was training there at a very early age. Whenever he could, the veteran coach — who knows a thing or two about tennis — would stop his daily tasks just to watch Alcaraz practise. He was never bored.
“I’d go to watch his training sessions, and every time, I’d see something exceptional, an unthinkable shot. I hadn’t seen that with anyone else. It was worth spending two hours there — you’d see things from another world,” Martínez-Cascales said in an interview with CLAY three years ago.
This sliced forehand used to be quite common in tennis 50 or 60 years ago — in the wooden-racket era, when tactics were everything. In today’s power-dominated game, it’s rare to find players who break the mould.
Sinner is the perfect example of the modern player: physically rock-solid, as fast as a gazelle on any surface, serving at 210 km/h effortlessly and barely showing weaknesses from the baseline. Alcaraz shares many of those qualities but adds that spark of genius that’s so hard to find. That exquisite touch inevitably recalls Roger Federer — the complete player and Alcaraz’s childhood mirror image, no matter how often he now says Nadal was his idol, shaped by time and by the weight of a legend. Deep down, Alcaraz was always more of a Federer guy.
لا بس عن خاطري بعد وحدة ☺️ لأنه هاذي أروع fake dropshot في التاريخ 😉 https://t.co/8Hgx1ZtjJL pic.twitter.com/fIgZMCX0Em
— 𝗕𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝘃𝗲✨ (@elmeer27) September 9, 2025
The Swiss also fooled rivals with the occasional fake dropshot, but he never used it as often as Alcaraz does — the Spaniard pulls it off almost every match.
It’s becoming his trademark. Perhaps it should even be called “to pull an Alcaraz,” just like in figure skating or gymnastics when a move bears someone’s name. The master of disguise. He’s the only player in the world who, when stepping into a forehand with the court open, has three clear options: to hit, to drop, or to fake drop.
Everything happens in milliseconds in Carlos Alcaraz’s world.
