Eric Klinenberg on “The End of the European Summer”

On August 17, IPK Director Eric Klinenberg published a piece for the New Yorker titled “The End of the European Summer.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

In late May, Jannik Sinner, the world’s top-ranked men’s-tennis player, was closing out a dominant second-round performance against Juan Manuel Cerúndolo, ranked fifty-sixth, at Roland Garros. The French Open, as English speakers tend to call it, takes place during a traditionally splendid time of the year, when Parisians delight in the temperate air.

Sinner, a lanky twenty-four-year-old Italian with red hair, sharp elbows, and ground strokes like shotgun blasts, had won thirty consecutive matches and was the overwhelming favorite. After cruising through two sets, he was one game from victory, with a win probability above ninety-nine per cent. Then, as Cerúndolo prepared to serve, Sinner grimaced, took a few gingerly steps, and stretched his apparently cramping legs. They had played for less than two hours, but this May felt like August. Paris lay beneath a heat dome, and the red-clay courts were baking in direct sunlight.

Ordinarily, Sinner attacks with explosive energy, crouching on his long legs before springing upward, his feet leaving the ground after each shot. Now he slapped awkwardly at the ball, his shoes seemingly stuck in the clay. He lost the next two games badly, then complained of possible dehydration and called for a medic. After a nearly ten-minute time-out, play resumed. Sinner hobbled on, grimacing, dizzy, stiff, and weak. He lost the set, then the next two, and so the match. “The heat got to him,” an announcer proclaimed, deeming the famously fit Novak Djokovic a new favorite to win the tournament. The next day, Djokovic vomited on the court during the fifth set and lost.

Jakub Menšík, a twenty-year-old Czech who reached the semifinals, fared even worse. After winning a four-hour-and-forty-one-minute match, he collapsed onto the clay, where he writhed with cramps for more than four minutes as medics brought ice. “It’s insane to play in this weather,” he said, after being taken to the locker room in a wheelchair.

For generations, the French Open has embodied the ideal gateway to the European summer. In 2026, the spectacle of world-class athletes breaking down in sweltering conditions became the latest sign that the Continent’s rapid warming is bringing that ideal to an end.

Read the full article here.