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Athletic ability Real-time reporting Day 1 2025 US OPEN
World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka will be “skilled” in 2025 – is this even important?
Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner can score eight points from eight in the Grand Slam eight-pointer – but their bigger battles are likely to be played in the world rankings.
Did Coco Gauff sacrifice her home professionalism for her big tennis?
Has this US issued a mixed doubles title, because the tennis world has known for so long that it heralds a Grand Slam event?
The 2025 U.S. Open promises to be a cookie. here, sportsTennis writers, Matt Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, painted some of the key storylines for the next two weeks.
How will defending champion Aryna Sabalenka define the rest of her season?
There is a season of hell in Sabalenka. She reached the semifinals of Wimbledon in Australia and France. She won Miami, and Madrid opened. She won the finals of BNP Paribas in the Stuttgart Grand Prix in India Wells, California and Germany. She is the “game” of the WTA Tour final.
But she still missed one thing she really wanted, which was to win the Grand Slam. She also wants to be the world's number one year. But she also has an elusive professional opportunity, and Igaświątek is also hot on the top ranked high heels.
Positively, she is the defending champion of the U.S. Open, and she has won three of the last five tough majors. Her Grand Slam record this year shows she was missing in the final game. But she also got a lot of wins through tiebreaks – tiebreaks became tiebreaks because she had to recover from servings, not because both players held them. Sabalenka had only two sets without rest in 19 sets that ended in tiebreaks in 2025.
“If this goal doesn't work, I still think this season is really great for me,” she said in a pre-match press conference.
“All the hard lessons I've learned this season will only make me stronger in the next season. In the preseason, I'll work harder to ensure next year's success is only one year of success, like real success.”
The world ranking number one in the “boring” is the tennis prototype, and although ultimately ultimately means small, the rejection is unsettling. Sabalenka seems to realize this – but she is also desperate to make sure she won't fill it.
Matt Futterman
Can Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner continue to have a prominent streak with another milestone?
There has never been a match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, let alone the final, which wouldn't be taken for granted in the U.S. Open in a potential meeting between Alcaraz and Sinner in two weeks.
If the world's two best male players have played for the third consecutive Grand Slam finals, it will be the first time in the ATP Tour in the same calendar year. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic faced each other in four consecutive finals in 2011 and 2012.
For the rest of the field, it is particularly worrying that each of them adds a little bit each time they play with each other and creates an ever-increasing distance from their peers. Another particularly worrying thing is that they have another major milestone in this regard: the world ranking No. 1. If Alcaraz improves Sinner's performance in New York, he will beat Sinner to No. 1 in the world last year, despite defeating his recent rival in all three games that year.
They seemed to know the task at hand. “If we don't keep improving, players will attract us,” Sina said in a press conference on Friday. “It's only a matter of time.”
After winning all seven majors between them, it still doesn't look like it happens soon.
Charlie Eccleshare
Alcaraz and Sinner are moving away from the rest of the men's field. Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
What does Coco Gauff's long-term view mean to her biggest victory location to date?
Focusing on the process rather than the result is the biggest cliché in sports and life. With clichés, this is not a bad thing.
Gauff became a walking billboard this week when she changed her technical coach and started changing her serve time a few days before the home run started, arguably her most important game of the year.
Her new coach, Gavin Macmillan, made quick results with her in Sabalenka when she worked with her three years ago. Her double drawbacks fell from 20 nearby units into a single number in a few weeks.
This doesn't mean that Gauff will happen. She knows.
“I’m looking at the long term,” Goff said Friday. “I wish I could get them together.” She knew she needed to make a change, even if it meant that the game could be sacrificed when trying to learn instantly.
“I don't want to waste time continuing to do the wrong thing,” she said.
Matt Futterman
Will the sandwich generation in men's tennis get worse?
With every pass of the Grand Slam, the 1990s-born sandwich generation led by Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas seems to be away from the real debate. Zverev is slightly different from the third place in the world, but it was a tragic year for Tsitsipas and Medvedev. Especially in the Grand Slam, they won two games between 2025.
Tsitsipas is fighting ongoing back injuries and has caused a worrying offer of the impact that affects him, and Medvedev looks hopelessly inadequate for most of the year.
Zverev said Friday that external factors must be taken into account when evaluating the form of players, and he hopes both Medvedev and Tsitsipas will return to the top ten in the world. But for the moment, the sinners are most likely to be the real challenger and Alcaraz appears to be young players, not the boy who lost the man.
How will other Grand Slams react to mixed doubles?
This week the U.S. Open doubles event won a huge victory in the Grand Slam armament competition. The format is gripy and lacks the proper doubles players, but usually the event accounts for a lot of dollars and headlines.
This is the first topic proposed with Emma Raducanu at a press conference on Friday, and she immediately suggested that other professions should follow suit. “Yes, I think it would be so interesting if all the Grand Slams were involved and did something similar, even if it wasn’t the exact same format.
“I think it’s a huge success.”
Of the remaining three, the French Open currently has no plans to change its hybrid doubles format, while Wimbledon is usually the most traditional Grand Slam and seems unlikely to follow the U.S. Open leadership. The All England Lawn Tennis Club did not respond to a request for comment; Australian Tennis Australia's flagship event (Australia Open) also tends to be the most innovative.
That said, all other Grand Slams, including the U.S. Open, can be refinished and remade last week’s mixed doubles event to make it a more attractive package. For example, Gauff said in a Friday press conference that she loved the event very much, but that would benefit from more actual doubles teams.
The only suitable doubles team that Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori participated retained their championship by surpassing the singles stars brought to the show.
Charlie Eccleshare
What are the late night signature matches of the U.S. Open and its policies aimed at limiting them?
The competition is notorious for its late end. It sells and celebrates it. It's an epic event when the race ends in the morning hours and falls asleep as the sun rises, no matter how bad it is for those who compete for one of the biggest prizes in the sport or anyone else.
This usually happens at night meetings on the stadium court, when there were two games, but before the men's game time was more than four hours or women's game time was more than three hours, the game's game policy was very late, which was introduced last year. If the match cannot begin before 11:15 p.m., the match officials claim to have the right to move the match to Louis Armstrong or Arthur Ashe Stadium.
That doesn't mean they will. As the first weekend of last year's U.S. Open, Zheng and Donna Vekic set the record for the latest women's game in U.S. open history, Zheng closed the match point at 2:15 a.m., a few minutes before Sabalenka and Ekaterina Alexandrova's third earlier in the third season. That went bankrupt on Friday, but starting at 12:08 a.m. on Saturday, it was the latest game in U.S. Open history.
They will talk to the players about it and consider their opinions, but don't have to follow them. Other factors include the speed of the game in the game and delays the following game, the status of the game and other factors.
what does that mean? It was probably open late in the United States.
Matt Futterman
Tell us what storylines you are looking for in the comments.
(Top photo of Aryna Sabalenka: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)