Adriano Panatta drops the bombshell: "Maybe they were stolen"
Adriano Panatta feeds the mystery and does not hide that he has some perplexities: the fact is that his home trophy case is empty. “I no longer have the trophy from the Internationals and I don’t even have the one from Roland Garros,” says the former world No. 4, as quoted in Gazzetta dello Sport. “I lost them. Actually I don’t have any cups, I don’t know where they are. I think I lost them during moves-I moved several times in my life. Or maybe they were stolen from me, I don’t know.”
And yet those trophies, physically gone, continue to weigh in the history of Italian tennis. Victory at the 1976 Internazionali d’Italia – when Panatta overcame Argentina’s Guillermo Vilas in the final – remains a record that has endured for exactly fifty years. A feat that the former champion himself recently celebrated with words laden with nostalgia: “When beautiful things age, they acquire even more charm. I believe it was the concatenation of events and the way they matured that sedimented a common memory that will never fade: the victory in Rome, two weeks after the one in Paris and always nullifying match points in the first match, then at the end of the year the first Davis Cup in our history in that context we all know. We had taken tennis out of the circles and turned it into a mass phenomenon: and that remains regardless.”
Fifty years later, it is Jannik Sinner who is chasing that legend on the Foro Italico’s Central. The South Tyrolean won the final of the Internazionali d’Italia 2026, where he faced Norway’s Casper Ruud. Panatta himself, on the final day of the tournament, was called upon to present the trophy to the winner: a symbolic passing of the baton between the champion of the past and the champion of the present.
Sinner’s path to the final was not without obstacles. In the semifinals, against Daniil Medvedev, the Italian had to contend with a match that was interrupted by rain and ended only the following day, finally imposing himself in three sets (6-2, 5-7, 6-4). It was a performance that ignited debate among experts, including Panatta himself, who in the podcast “The Phone Call” on Spotify noted, “The second set was of a very high level, but for the first time in a long time I saw Sinner take shots from the back court. He is not used to it, and when he is forced to chase, he is not the strongest of all.” On the same wavelength Paolo Bertolucci: “We witnessed a battle, at times even of the highest level. Sinner showed some difficulties in the defensive phase and, in this aspect, he is not the best on the circuit.” However, Bertolucci emphasized the reaction in the deciding set: “I really appreciated the way he reacted in the third set, also showing his more human side. After the 2-1 break he screamed: it’s the first time I’ve seen him almost decomposed.”
Curiously, the bond between Panatta and Sinner seems to be one-way, at least on the level of mutual acquaintance. The world number one candidly admitted that he has never watched a match of the former Roman champion: “On social media you get the points from a long time ago, but I’ve never watched a Panatta match. Wooden racket? I was given one once but I don’t know where it went….” A confession that, in a curious irony of fate, echoes the very story of Panatta’s missing cups: Sinner, like his predecessor, also misplaced a wooden racket he received as a gift.
