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Comment by jp57 | Hacker News Reader

An interesting article to revisit 8+ years later.

Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age

Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a feeling.

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To quote McEnroe, commentating Wimbledon this year: "Father Time, undefeated." Djokovic is mentioned in the article and has only just ended his dominant era, and is still ranked 4th in the world at 38. So we did get some very long runs in there, and I would imagine just 3 years ago or so people would have expected some mid to late 20s/early 30s guys like Zverev or Fritz to be having their turn. Both of whom, some asterisks.

Instead we got this young duo / lightning in a bottle situation; and I expect that both Sinner and Alcaraz are likely to be playing dominantly into their mid 30s barring injury, or maybe Alcaraz buying a nightclub in Ibiza and retiring.

Yeah, this article is quite funny in the context of today's men's tennis landscape, where an entire generation of players (90s born) were effectively blocked from the big prizes by being sandwiched between two generations of all time greats. Money is obviously an important factor in the growth and development of most athletes, but the article seems to be downplaying the importance of inherent talent and ability in sport.

A possible factor on your observation is females athletically peaking earlier.

Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant age difference between men and women for both top 10 player lists and top 100 player lists

Or just that younger women are hotter so they attract more of an audience.

Lol. I didn’t realize how important audience following was to winning tennis matches.

Pretty important! More fans mean more sponsorship dollars, which mean better coaches, food, &c, which means better conditioning and training for the match, and thus a higher chance of winning and getting more fans and more sponsorship cycles.

I actually think it’s great. The level playing field can get a bit overrated. Hungary entrepreneurs will intuitively understand the parallels.

That was my first thought, but then again, players with a large fan base are more likely to get a wildcard into an event they don't directly qualify for.

Or players with that potential are likely to get resources investment earlier in the pipeline making them more able to perform well on non-subjective criteria

Actually audience support during tight matches can be decisive.

its possible tennis has become more of an established business now and players are being groomed by cartels as a cog in the machine, compared to the more self made outliers of the past.

I know nothing about tennis, but I think the general point still stands.

Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.

With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge economies of scale and social interaction means huge network effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest people in 2025 got there from tech.

Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal with it.

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