Update — Aug. 20, 2026: All four went through. Frances Tiafoe beat second seed Felix Auger-Aliassime 6-3, 6-4 and Brandon Nakashima beat Nuno Borges in three sets, leaving four American men and four American women in the Cincinnati quarterfinals, with Fritz and Nakashima drawn against each other.
Update — Aug. 19, 2026: Two of the four Americans in the last 16 are now through. Taylor Fritz beat Christopher O’Connell 6-4, 6-3, and Tommy Paul removed top seed Alexander Zverev 4-6, 7-6(6), 6-4, saving a match point after a rain delay of close to 90 minutes to reach his first Cincinnati quarterfinal. Nakashima’s fourth-round match against Nuno Borges and Frances Tiafoe’s against Felix Auger-Aliassime were both still in play late Wednesday.
Brandon Nakashima had lost the first set, lost his serve in the second, and was standing three points from the end of his tournament. Daniil Medvedev held three match points. Nakashima saved all three, took the second set in a tiebreak, and then took the third for the loss of a single game, beating the No. 4 seed 6-7(3), 7-6(4), 6-1 to reach the fourth round of the Cincinnati Open.
The scoreline understates how far the match travelled. Medvedev, the 2019 champion here, had won all three of their previous meetings and had never lost a set to Nakashima on a hard court, including a straight-sets win in the Brisbane final in January. He had come through his opener against Marco Trungelliti without difficulty. For roughly ninety minutes on Grandstand he was the better player, and then, from the moment the first match point went begging, he was not. The third set lasted barely half an hour.
For Nakashima it is the continuation of the best stretch of his career. He reached the semifinals in Washington, then the final in Montreal, and arrived in Ohio on short rest with a summer hard-court record that has climbed steadily through the swing. He beat Aleksandar Kovacevic on Sunday with almost no recovery time and has now beaten a top-10 opponent from a set and a break down. He plays Nuno Borges next, who ended his own five-match losing run against Andrey Rublev with a 6-3, 6-4 win.
What makes the result matter beyond one afternoon is the company it puts him in. Four of the sixteen men left in the draw are American. Taylor Fritz beat Daniel Merida 6-3, 6-4, a win that took him to thirty match victories for the season and made him the fourth American man to reach that figure this year, after Tommy Paul, Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe. It was Fritz’s fourth appearance in the Cincinnati last 16 in five years. Paul is through as well, and Tiafoe closed the third round out after midnight by edging Learner Tien 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 in an all-American match that finished with the two of them laughing at the net.
That quartet has been assembled partly by their own form and partly by attrition at the top of the draw. This was already a tournament without Jannik Sinner, who withdrew with a knee problem, and without Carlos Alcaraz, the defending champion, who has not played since April. Then Novak Djokovic went out in the second round to Thiago Agustin Tirante after struggling badly in the heat. Then Shelton lost to qualifier Jaime Faria three days after winning Montreal. Medvedev’s exit removes the fourth of the names that any preview of this event would have led with, and the projections written a week ago now describe a field that has largely stopped existing.
Top seed Alexander Zverev is still in, and meets Paul on Wednesday in the most consequential of the fourth-round matches. Felix Auger-Aliassime, seeded second, reached the last 16 for the fifth time in six years at this tournament and faces Tiafoe. Faria, having beaten Shelton and then Adam Walton, plays Lorenzo Musetti. Rafael Jodar, nineteen and closing on the top ten, meets Flavio Cobolli. Fritz, the highest-ranked American left, has the least complicated assignment on paper.
The timing is the part worth holding onto. The US Open main draw begins on Aug. 30, eleven days from now, and seedings will be set off the rankings published on Aug. 24 — meaning the points won and lost in Ohio this week land directly on the draw sheet in New York. American men have already moved substantially in the rankings this month. Nakashima, seeded 27th here, is the one making the sharpest move of all, and he did it on a day when he was three points from going home.
Related: the running Cincinnati withdrawals tracker and the original draw preview.
