The Cincinnati Open cancelled its entire second day of qualifying on Wednesday without admitting a single spectator, leaving 24 main-draw places unresolved on the eve of a tournament scheduled to begin its first round on Thursday.
Thirty-three qualifying matches had been scheduled at the Lindner Family Tennis Center. None of them started. The tournament announced its first delay at 9:02 a.m. and pushed the start time back through the day, first to 1 p.m., then 2:30 p.m., then 4 p.m., before abandoning the session outright at 4 p.m. Gates never opened.
The National Weather Service had issued a flood warning for Warren County that ran until 11 p.m., and a shelter-in-place warning was in force at the site shortly after midday. The tournament said the closure was made “out of an abundance of caution for our fans.”
It was the second consecutive day disrupted. Qualifying opened on Tuesday with play delayed from 10:30 a.m. until after midday, then suspended again at around 3:30 p.m., leaving eight matches to be carried over. The response was to double-book Wednesday, putting some players on the schedule twice in a day so the round could be completed before the main draw began. The weather removed that option as well.
The arithmetic. Qualifying at Cincinnati is a two-round competition contested by 48 men and 48 women, with 12 of each reaching the main draw. That is 24 places in an ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000 event, and as of Wednesday evening the great majority of them had not been decided. Main-draw play is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. on Thursday. A tournament official told the Cincinnati Enquirer that matches might still be played behind closed doors if conditions allowed, but no revised qualifying schedule had been published when the session was called off.
Who is waiting. The names still in qualifying are not the ones the entry lists advertised three weeks ago. Stefanos Tsitsipas, a former world No. 3 and the 2022 Cincinnati finalist, was announced at No. 51 as the highest-ranked player in the qualifying draw, but he never played it. A run of withdrawals from the main-draw entry list moved him up before qualifying began, and he opens against Valentin Royer in the first round.
He is not alone in that. Marin Cilic, the 2016 Cincinnati champion, was also listed for qualifying and instead entered the main draw on a wild card. Thanasi Kokkinakis took a place on a protected ranking, Lorenzo Sonego moved up as a replacement, and Rinky Hijikata received a main-draw wild card. The effect is that the qualifying field lost much of its marquee weight before the rain arrived, and the players whose places remain undecided are largely those with the least cushion in the rankings.
The structural point. Cincinnati completed a substantial redevelopment of the site before the 2025 edition and expanded the tournament to a longer format, but no court at the venue is covered. Every match on the grounds depends entirely on the weather. Qualifying was allocated two days with no reserve day behind it, and the calendar on either side offers nothing to borrow from — the North American hard-court swing has a second 1000-level event finishing in Canada on Thursday, and the US Open begins in 18 days.
That leaves the tournament with a compressed set of options and no good ones. Qualifying can be folded into Thursday alongside first-round play, which is what organizers had explicitly been trying to avoid, or the round can be squeezed further and ask players to complete two matches in a day to earn a place opposite a seeded opponent immediately afterwards. Either way, whoever comes through will arrive at the main draw with a workload nobody in it has had to carry.
Correction, August 13, 2026: An earlier version of this article reported that Stefanos Tsitsipas, Marin Cilic, Lorenzo Sonego, Thanasi Kokkinakis and Rinky Hijikata were in the Cincinnati qualifying field. All five had entered the main draw before qualifying began, through a combination of withdrawal replacements, wild cards and a protected ranking. The relevant passage has been corrected. Global Tennis News regrets the error.
