NEW YORKIn an attempt to attract the best singles players, the U.S. Open redesigned its mixed doubles competition.
The reigning champions have no intention of giving up lightly.
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On Tuesday, Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori defeated Taylor Fritz and Elena Rybakina, the tournament’s second-seeded combination, 4-2, 4-2 to capture the first victory.
With a structure that feels more like a demonstration than one deserving of a Grand Slam trophy, traditional doubles experts like the Italian duo were among the harshest critics of the alterations. In fact, following her team’s first-round triumph, Karolina Muchova called it an exhibition in the postmatch interview.
Although Errani and Vavassori are the only conventional doubles combination competing, the $1 million prize for the winning duo would be a tremendous boost to doubles players.
We tried our best since we are also playing for all the doubles players who were unable to compete here, Vavassori remarked.
Venus Williams and Reilly Opelka were defeated 4-2, 5-4 (4) by Muchova and Andrey Rublev, who were scheduled to play them in the second round.
Rybakina, a former Wimbledon women’s singles winner, and Fritz, the men’s singles runner-up at the U.S. Open last year, are precisely the kind of players the U.S. Tennis Association was looking for when it redesigned the competition.
The mixed doubles, which is now a two-day event with 16 teams, starts well before the singles events start on Sunday. The organizers think that if it didn’t interfere with the singles stars’ ability to rest and recover during that event, they would be more inclined to play.
In the beginning, Errani and Vavassori were unsure if they would get the opportunity to defend their championship under the new structure, which automatically places eight teams according to the players’ combined singles rankings. The USTA issued wild cards for the remaining positions.
One of them was handed to the Italians, who displayed their abilities in a victory that lasted only forty-two minutes. Since winning teams would need to play twice on the first day in order to advance to the semifinals and finals on Wednesday night, the abbreviated format allows the matches to go by quickly.
Later on Tuesday, Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu faced the top-seeded combination of Jessica Pegula and Jack Draper in the first-round schedule’s feature match.
Last year, in a stadium with plenty of empty seats, Errani and Vavassori won the title in Flushing Meadows late in the second week of the competition.
While qualifying events for the singles tournaments are typically the sole competitions held, the revised schedule now includes mixed doubles. The opening match at Louis Armstrong Stadium drew a far larger crowd than mixed doubles often does since admission to the grounds is free during what the USTA refers tennis as “fan week.”
After Errani and Vavassori won the first set in under 19 minutes, some fans might not have even recognized that the match was going to a second set. To win the set under conventional tennis scoring, they would have needed to win six games rather than four.
Through the semifinals, the format was set at four games with a 10-point match tiebreaker in place of a third set. With sets to six games, 6-all tiebreakers, and a 10-point tiebreak for a third set, only the final would resemble a typical match.
Top-ranked Jannik Sinner pulled out Tuesday morning after becoming ill during his loss to Alcaraz on Monday in the Cincinnati final, as teams continued to be pulled as the closing hours approached. Consequently, a large number of names that were never on the original entry list appeared on the final one.
Less than twenty-four hours after winning the women’s championship in Cincinnati, Iga Swiatek’s third-seeded team defeated Americans Madison Keys and Frances Tiafoe 4-1, 4-2. Naomi Osaka and Gael Monfils were defeated 5-3, 4-2, by Caty McNally and Lorenzo Musetti.
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