Jannik Sinner and Zizou Bergs opened their Monte Carlo Masters doubles campaign with a straight‑sets win, defeating Tomas Machac and Casper Ruud 6‑4, 7‑5 in one hour and 23 minutes on Monday. The victory moves the Italian‑Belgian pairing into the quarterfinals of the ATP Masters 1000 event on clay, a tournament with total prize money of €6,309,095.
Sinner, who has previously shown he can succeed in doubles — he won the Atlanta title in 2021 with Reilly Opelka — teamed with Belgian Zizou Bergs for the first time in the principality. The duo kept the match clean, closing out both sets without the need for a decider against the Czech‑Norwegian pairing of Machac and Ruud.
The result is a notable contrast with Sinner’s recent Monte Carlo doubles history. He has been a regular entrant in the tournament between 2021 and 2024 but managed just a single match win prior to this year, that lone victory coming in 2023 when he partnered Diego Schwartzman. This year’s successful opener suggests Sinner is taking another look at doubles as part of his clay‑court preparations.
Their next assignment will be a quarterfinal clash against the winners of the tie between the eighth‑seeded pairing Guido Andreozzi and Manuel Guinard and the Greek siblings Stefanos and Pavlos Tsitsipas. That matchup promises a different style of opposition depending on which duo advances: Andreozzi and Guinard bring established doubles cohesion as seeded contenders, while the Tsitsipas brothers combine Stefanos’s high‑profile singles pedigree with Pavlos’s familiarity at Tour level.
Casper Ruud and Tomas Machac, both primarily singles competitors, have occasionally featured in doubles events but were unable to unlock the Sinner‑Bergs partnership on the Monte Carlo clay. The straight‑sets scoreline and the relatively brisk duration underlined the winners’ efficiency on a day when many top singles names also populated the tournament draw.
The Monte Carlo Masters continues through the week with singles and doubles draws narrowing toward the semifinals. For Sinner and Bergs, the win offers momentum and a chance to extend their run into the latter stages of one of the ATP’s most prestigious clay‑court tournaments.