Jannik Sinner is the world's best tennis player. This is the journey that forged a champion.

It was in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains that a three-year-old Jannik Sinner took his first steps towards becoming the world's best player. It started on the ski slopes, where he was so good he later became a giant slalom runner-up in the junior national championships. Sinner also showed enormous promise on the football pitch with an instinctive ability to play with both feet. But tennis soon started to take over Sinner's life in the mountain village of Sexten, just a short hike from the Austrian border. It is a picturesque, peaceful place. Street signs are presented in both Italian and German, but the main language is a German dialect. Plates in restaurants regularly carry meat and dumplings, as if you were ordering from an Austrian or German menu. It may not look an obvious launchpad for the career of a future world number one - but, as the dome that stretches over a nearby indoor tennis courts proclaims, it is "where champions are born". Sinner's first coach was family friend Andreas Schönegger. Having given the infant Sinner an introduction to life on skis in his fourth winter, he was entrusted with tennis lessons the following summer. Sinner was a slight child - often the smallest in his group - but what he lacked in physical presence he more than made up for in talent.