Tennis

U.S. Open draw 2024: Luck for Djokovic? Reset for Gauff? Relief for Swiatek?

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2 months ago

August 22, 2024

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U.S. Open draw 2024: Luck for Djokovic? Reset for Gauff? Relief for Swiatek?

The U.S. Open 2024 begins Monday in New York City, and the draws for the men’s and women’s singles are intriguing — and have thrown up some blockbuster first-round matches.

The Athletic’s tennis writers, Matthew Futterman and Charlie Eccleshare, analyze the match-ups, as well as offering some of their picks for the best matches of the opening days.

Defending champion Novak Djokovic evades his two biggest rivals, again

Novak Djokovic, the greatest tennis player of the modern era by the numbers, also has some of the greatest luck in tennis.

For a third consecutive Grand Slam, Djokovic has landed on the opposite side of the draw from Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, the two players who have proven themselves to be his equal or even a little better this year, especially in the Grand Slams.

Sinner won in Australia. Alcaraz won the French Open and Wimbledon. Djokovic arrives in New York without winning one of the last three Slams for the first time in 14 years.

And just like in Paris and London, he will not meet Sinner or Alcaraz until the final, if at all. If you’re 37 years old and coming off a few weeks’ rest, following an exhausting triumph at the Olympics, that’s very good fortune. Beating Sinner and Alcaraz back-to-back in a semi and a final would be a tall order for anyone these days — even Djokovic.

Djokovic hung up the phone on Ben Shelton at last year’s tournament (Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

Naomi Osaka gets the opposite of good fortune

If fairy dust has been sprinkled over Djokovic all season at draw time, Naomi Osaka has been carrying around the opposite of that.

Caroline Garcia in the first round in Australia. Iga Swiatek in the second round in Paris. Wimbledon looked OK, until she ran into a hot Emma Navarro in the second round. Osaka, who is coming back from maternity leave after giving birth to her first child in July 2023, will face Jelena Ostapenko in the first round.

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Ostapenko, seeded 10th, is a fearless big hitter, who should like the feel of Osaka’s hard, flat ball. They’ve only played each other once — Osaka won, but that was eight years ago on clay, so it’s not much of a crystal ball. Osaka was, and perhaps remains, one of the world’s great hard-court players, a two-time winner of both the U.S. Open and Australian Open.

The plan has been for her comeback to catch fire in New York. Ostapenko should pose an immediate, big-time test.

Osaka announced herself by beating Serena Williams to win the 2018 U.S. Open (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

Coco Gauff awaits her chance to reverse her slump

The best news about the draw for Coco Gauff is that she’s on the opposite side from Swiatek, who has beaten her 11 out of 12 times. They won’t face each other unless both players make the final.

Since the French Open, Gauff hasn’t shown the form that would qualify her thinking in those terms. She lost in the fourth round of Wimbledon and the third round at the Olympics. She lost her second match in Canada in the round of 16, and her first match in Cincinnati in the round of 32.

Gauff being Gauff, she likely isn’t looking at what’s going to happen in the second week. She is the queen of not looking ahead, instead focusing on her next match, not even the one after that.

She will face Varvara Gracheva of France in the first round. Gracheva is ranked 66th in the world. She’s in the same quarter of the draw as Elina Svitolina, Navarro, who knocked her out of Wimbledon, and Marta Kostyuk, and is in the same half as Aryna Sabalenka, who just won Cincinnati.

She has a long, long, road to Swiatek.

Gauff captured the title at last year’s U.S. Open (Al Bello/Getty Images)

Matt Futterman

Matt Futterman’s matches to watch:

Bianca Andreescu vs. Jasmine Paolini (5)
Ben Shelton (13) vs. Dominic Thiem
Reilly Opelka vs. Lorenzo Musetti (18)

Alcaraz and Sinner target another semifinal duel

Djokovic’s good fortune means that Alcaraz and Sinner could have to duke it out in another major semifinal. That would mean a rematch of their epic five-set quarterfinal from two years ago, which Alcaraz won at 2:50am after five hours of exhilarating tennis.

To get there, Sinner may have to get past the American No 14 seed Tommy Paul in the fourth round, and then the No 5 seed Daniil Medvedev, who beat him at Wimbledon last month, in the quarters. More importantly, he will have to manage the scrutiny of his recent anti-doping sanction, which promises to be one of the defining sub-plots of the tournament.

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Alcaraz has a kinder-looking path to the latter stages, with the greatest threat to the French Open and Wimbledon champion appearing to be one of those increasingly rare days when he loses concentration.

Sinner and Alcaraz’s 2022 foregrounded their incredible rivalry at the top of men’s tennis (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

Emma Raducanu returns to her greatest triumph with a reality check

Britain’s 2021 champion opens up with a very tricky-looking match against America’s Sofia Kenin, a Grand Slam winner herself in Melbourne four years ago. If she wins that, she faces a likely second round against another home player, the No 6 seed Jessica Pegula.

It’s a rough draw for Raducanu but, as she said at Wimbledon this year, where she beat the No 9 seed Maria Sakkari in the third round, she is often at her best when the underdog. Winning the U.S. Open as a qualifier in 2021 is a pretty good illustration of that.

But Kenin is becoming a tough-first-round draw specialist. At Wimbledon in 2023, she knocked out Coco Gauff and 12 months later, she opened up against Iga Swiatek, losing in two competitive sets.

Raducanu’s triumph was one of the most surprising in U.S. Open history (Elsa/Getty Images)

The draw could have been worse for Raducanu, given she is not seeded, but she’s looked more like herself in recent months. At Wimbledon, she reached her first fourth round at a major since that U.S. Open title three years ago, and backed that up with a quarterfinal run at the Citi Open in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago.

Some fortune for Iga Swiatek?

At Wimbledon, the big story from the women’s draw was the rotten luck of the No 1 seed Swiatek, who seemingly had peril at every turn. So it proved, as she was knocked out in the third round by Yulia Putintseva, one of tennis’ most feared giant killers.

This time, the fates have been kinder to Swiatek, with the 2022 champion facing a qualifier in the first round, possibly another in the second, and then most likely the No 25 seed Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in the third.

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Swiatek could play Danielle Collins in the quarterfinal, which would be a blockbuster occasion in the American’s final Grand Slam — especially given the strange way their recent match at the Olympics played out, with Collins saying she had told the world No 1 that she did not have to be “insincere” about Collins retiring through injury.