US Open: Briefs
BRIEFS
US Open
Every dispatch written about the US Open, newest first, grouped by edition. Each one is built from the same data as the tournament pages it sits beside.
US Open 2026
The last four women at the US Open are seeds 1, 2, 3 and 4. That last happened in 1975.
Aryna Sabalenka beat Linda Noskova 7-6(1) 3-6 7-6(7). Jessica Pegula beat Emma Navarro 3-6 6-4 6-3. Coco Gauff beat Mirra Andreeva 2-6 7-6(7) 6-2. Elena Rybakina beat Qinwen Zheng 3-6 6-1 6-4. Four quarter-finals, four higher seeds, four three-setters, and a combined margin of 27 points out of the 787 played. The top four seeds are in a US Open women’s semi-final together for the first time since 1975. This is the tournament I would have drawn if you had let me. I take…
Serena and Venus Williams out in the first round of US Open
Hao-Ching Chan and Maya Joint beat Serena and Venus Williams 6-3 6-7(6) 7-6(7) on Friday night in the first round of the women’s doubles. It took three hours and two minutes, the longest match of the round by twenty-nine minutes. The sisters won the second-set tiebreak 8–6, went 5–0 up in the ten-point breaker that decided it, and lost ten of the next twelve points. Two of those were their own double faults. Of 249 points the losing team won 121, which is more…
Djokovic goes out in the US Open first round
Mariano Navone, ranked 48th and 13–33 on hard courts for his career, beat Novak Djokovic 7-6(5) 5-7 4-6 6-2 6-1 on Arthur Ashe on Sunday night. It took four hours thirty-six, an inhaler, a medical timeout and, at 1-3 in the fifth, tears. It ended the longest run of first-round wins the Open era has recorded. We have all seen this film. Post-Jordan, post-Gretzky, post-Tiger: the great one goes, the sport announces that the void is unfillable, and then quietly discovers it was filled…
The US Open main draw opens tomorrow
The main draw opens tomorrow at Flushing Meadows. Two hundred and fifty-six singles players, a first round smeared across three days, finals on the 12th and 13th, and the world number one at home with a knee that will not cooperate. A few things that did not earn a section of their own. Forty-one of the entrants are American, more than twice any other country and roughly what you would expect from a tournament held in Queens. Fifteen more play under no flag at…
The whole corpus lives at Briefs.