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Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Round of 64
Learner Tien vs Gael Monfils — 6-3 6-4 6-3
 Learner Tien✓ | 6 | 6 | 6 |
 Gael Monfils | 3 | 4 | 3 |
Final · Thursday, September 3, 2026 · Round of 64
Result
Monfils's 201st and last Grand Slam match, and his 52nd at this tournament. He turned 40 two days earlier and marked it by winning a first-round match, the oldest man to do that here since Jimmy Connors in 1992 — who was also 40, and also on his birthday. Against a 20-year-old seeded 14th he went 0 for 8 on break points, the last of them lost when he missed a smash by millimetres at 3-4 in the third; Tien was not broken all night and made 21 unforced errors to Monfils's 54. Monfils saved three match points at 5-3 and lost on the fourth. The crowd chanted his name, he was shown a montage of his US Open years, and he was handed a framed poster of himself. His debut here in 2005 was a five-set first-round loss to Novak Djokovic; his best run, the 2016 semi-final, also ended against Djokovic. He leaves with 131 major match wins, more than any other Frenchman, and no major title. "I'm just me, Gael Monfils," he said in the last press conference of his Grand Slam career. "Some people think I'm fun, some not." He starts work in wealth management for a Swiss firm next year. Next for Tien: Jakub Mensik.
Learner TienRows the source hadn’t published are left off rather than guessed.
At this Stage
The Round of 64 is where a Grand Slam draw stops being a lottery and becomes a tournament. Sixty-four men's matches opened the bracket; thirty-two across Wednesday and Thursday halve what is left, and everyone still here has already won on these courts. Seeds who came through the first round now meet opponents carrying form rather than a ranking.
Round of 128
Round of 64
What we know now
Court: Louis Armstrong Stadium
Match length: 2:17
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
What I said beforehand
The preview, frozen before the first serve. Clearly dated, never rewritten — that's the deal that makes the pick worth anything.
Tien, and the twenty-year age gap is the smaller of the two reasons. The 14th seed beat Nuno Borges 6-4 6-1 6-2 in an hour and forty minutes without serving a double fault, won 76% of his first-serve points and broke six times from sixteen chances against a man who had reached the second round of his previous eight Slams. He is a left-hander ranked 15th in the world, 60-33 on hard courts for a career that started three years ago, and he has already beaten Monfils this season — in Montreal in August, 6-3 0-6 6-3, after which he asked for an autograph. Monfils is the story of the round and the underdog of it. He turned 40 on the day of his first round, lost the opening set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo and then won eighteen of the next twenty-one games; it was his 34th US Open main-draw win, a French record, and his 200th Grand Slam match. He is also ranked 311th, 5-10 on the season, and retiring at the end of it. Over three sets in Canada he took one off Tien for the loss of nothing; over five, the arithmetic of a 40-year-old body against a 20-year-old one is the whole match.
The case for Learner Tien
66% to winTien is a top-15 left-hander in the form of his life who has already solved this puzzle once this season, and his first round was the more economical by forty minutes and two sets. Monfils is 311th in the world with a 5-10 record for the year, and the four hours of tennis he has in him are worth less over best-of-five than over best-of-three. Twenty of Monfils's twenty-one winning games came against a man in his first Slam main draw by ranking; Tien is a different examination, and he does not miss.
The case for Gael Monfils
34% to winMonfils has won 397 hard-court matches to Tien's 60 and played 70 Grand Slam tournaments to Tien's handful, and the one set he took off him in Montreal he took 6-0. He is a semi-finalist here, the crowd is entirely his, and the Armstrong or Ashe night session is the kind of theatre he has spent twenty years being better at than his ranking. Tien has never been past the first round in New York and is 20 years old in the second week of a Slam he is now expected to go deep in — expectation is a new opponent for him.
Both cases written 2026-09-02, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
My locked pick: Learner Tien to advance ✓ RIGHT
“A top-15 left-hander who has already beaten Monfils this season, against a 40-year-old ranked 311st over five sets; the crowd is the only thing on the other side.”
Locked 2026-09-02 10:30 UTC — rendered verbatim from the pick ledger; never a fresher, hedged version
Tale of the tape
Learner TienGael MonfilsPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-02.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
Storylines
- Tien leads 1-0: he beat Monfils 6-3 0-6 6-3 in the Montreal second round in August, then asked him for an autograph.
- Monfils turned 40 on the day of his first round and beat Adolfo Daniel Vallejo 2-6 6-1 6-2 6-0; it was his 34th US Open main-draw win, a French record, and his 200th Grand Slam match.
- Only two men over 40 had won a US Open men's singles match in the previous fifty years — Ken Rosewall in 1977 and Jimmy Connors on his 40th birthday in 1992.
- Monfils is retiring at the end of the season and has called this his last US Open; his best result here is the 2016 semi-final.
- Tien beat Nuno Borges 6-4 6-1 6-2 in 1:40 with no double faults and six breaks from sixteen chances; he had never won a match at this tournament before this week.
Head to head
Tien leads 1-0. They met once, in the Montreal second round in August 2026, on hard: Tien won 6-3 0-6 6-3.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-02.
Court & schedule: Louis Armstrong Stadium, Thursday 3 September in the night session. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-02)
Weather: Sunday — the men's final, and the last match of the fortnight — is 78°F with showers and thunderstorms 95% likely, the wettest day of the two weeks and the one day that cannot be pushed back. Ashe closes its roof and plays on. It clears overnight: 20% Sunday night, 20% Monday, then dry and sunny from Tuesday. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-13)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.