Jannik Sinner has withdrawn from the Cincinnati Open with a right knee injury, pulling the world No. 1 out of the last Masters 1000 tournament before the US Open and leaving the event without either of the two highest-ranked men in the sport.
Sinner announced the decision Sunday, two days before qualifying begins in Mason, Ohio, saying he had consulted his doctors and his team before accepting that the knee would not let him play. “I have to accept that I’m not ready to compete yet,” he said. He wished tournament director Bob Moran a successful week, said he expected to be back next year, and made clear his attention has already shifted to New York, where the US Open main draw begins Aug. 30.
The withdrawal is the second straight Masters 1000 the Italian has skipped. He also pulled out of the National Bank Open in Montreal last month, a decision that ended his pursuit of a clean sweep of the 2026 Masters series after titles at Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid and Rome. He has not played a competitive match since beating Alexander Zverev in four sets in the Wimbledon final on July 12 to take a second consecutive title at the All England Club and the fifth major of his career.
Should he line up in New York, Sinner will walk into a Grand Slam without a tune-up match for the second time in three months. That approach worked at Wimbledon, where he entered without a single grass-court warm-up event and won the title anyway. The margin for error is thinner on hard courts in late August, where the schedule is more compressed and the depth in the men’s draw runs deeper, but the precedent is recent enough to blunt the panic.
The cost in the rankings is modest. Sinner reached the Cincinnati final in 2025 and retired from it while trailing Carlos Alcaraz 5-0 in the opening set, having fallen ill on the eve of the match, and the points from that runner-up finish now come off his total. His lead at the top is comfortable enough to absorb the loss. The more meaningful cost is time — a knee that has taken three weeks of hard-court preparation out of the calendar at exactly the point when he would normally be sharpening for the season’s final major.
Cincinnati loses one of its signature names. Sinner won the title in Mason in 2024 and carries a 12-4 record at the event, and the tournament had built its men’s field around a world No. 1 who has gone 44-3 this season. It now stages the last significant hard-court test before Flushing Meadows without him and without Alcaraz, who has not competed since April because of a right wrist injury and withdrew from Cincinnati last week. The defending men’s champion and the top-ranked player are both absent from the same draw.
That reshuffles the top of the bracket. Zverev and Felix Auger-Aliassime are expected to move up as the leading seeds, with Alex de Minaur and Ben Shelton close behind, and Novak Djokovic remains in the field after skipping Montreal. For the American contingent — Shelton, Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, Frances Tiafoe and the rest of the 24 US men and women entered — the draw has opened in a way it rarely does at this level. Cincinnati is also the final chance to move US Open seeding before the cutoff, which gives the week added weight for players hovering around the seeding line.
The men’s withdrawal list had already grown before Sunday. Holger Rune, Alexander Bublik, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Sebastian Korda and Ethan Quinn are out alongside Alcaraz, and the combined ATP and WTA total had climbed past 10 by the weekend, with Jasmine Paolini among the women’s absentees.
Qualifying at the Lindner Family Tennis Center begins Tuesday, Aug. 11. The main draw runs from Thursday, Aug. 13 through the singles finals on Sunday, Aug. 23. The US Open follows a week later, with Fan Week opening Aug. 23, qualifying from Aug. 24 and the main draw starting Aug. 30.
For Sinner, the next three weeks are now a rehabilitation window rather than a competitive one. He has not put a date on his return, and no medical timeline has been made public beyond his own account of a knee that has been bothering him and a team that has been working on it. What he has committed to is the destination: New York, on Aug. 30, ready or otherwise.
