Update — Aug. 21, 2026: A day after Alcaraz confirmed his return, the man he beat in last year’s final went the other way. Jannik Sinner withdrew from the US Open on Friday with a right knee injury. Alcaraz is now the highest-ranked man in the field, which means he will defend the title without a warm-up match and without the rival who has shadowed every major he has played since 2024.
Carlos Alcaraz will defend his US Open title, and he will do it having played one competitive match since the middle of April. The world No. 2 confirmed his entry Thursday in a post on his social media accounts, 10 days before the main draw opens at Flushing Meadows on Aug. 30. “I’m back. Here we go,” he said.
The confirmation closes a question that has shadowed the men’s draw since spring. Alcaraz won his opening match at the Barcelona Open in mid-April, then withdrew with a right wrist injury and has not competed since. The layoff cost him Madrid, Rome and Roland Garros, then Queen’s Club and Wimbledon, then the Canadian Open, and finally the Cincinnati Open, where he had been entered and where he was expected to make his comeback before pulling out earlier this month.
What is unusual about the return is not its length but its shape. Alcaraz arrives in New York with no tune-up event at all — no 250, no 500, no Masters 1000, not a single set of match play on a hard court that counts. The last major he skipped before this year was the 2023 Australian Open, with a hamstring problem. Between his main-draw debut in Melbourne in 2021 and this April, that was the only one he had missed.
He is 23, and he is the defending champion at the tournament where he beat Jannik Sinner in last year’s final for his second title in New York. He is also a seven-time Grand Slam champion who began this season by winning the Australian Open, the title that completed his career Grand Slam and made him the youngest man to do it. He added a hard-court title in Doha in February. Then the wrist stopped everything.
The ranking held up better than the schedule. Alexander Zverev moved past him into second place after Wimbledon, but Alcaraz has since taken the position back, and he will be seeded second in New York despite an absence covering two majors and the whole of the North American hard-court swing.
The preparation that led to Thursday’s announcement has been visible for about a week. Alcaraz has been training in Murcia, in southeastern Spain, and hit with Holger Rune there in sessions photographed and circulated on social media, testing the wrist at an intensity closer to match conditions than anything he had attempted earlier in the summer. Those images did as much as anything to shift expectations before the announcement itself; when he withdrew from Cincinnati, the assumption in many quarters was that the title defense was in doubt.
The Cincinnati withdrawal now reads differently. It was framed at the time as a setback, and it removed the reigning champion from the last significant hard-court event before the majors. In hindsight it looks like a decision to spend the remaining runway on rehabilitation rather than results — a trade of competitive rust for a wrist that could hold up over seven matches in two weeks.
Whether that trade works is the question the first week will answer. Grand Slam tennis is best-of-five sets for the men, and the early rounds are where an unseeded opponent with rhythm has historically been most dangerous to a returning player. Alcaraz’s draw will not be made until next week.
He is not the only leading man whose fitness has framed the buildup. Sinner, the world No. 1, has not played since the Wimbledon final on July 12 and withdrew from Cincinnati with a right knee problem. He has not confirmed his participation in New York, and no statement from him or his team has set a date.
That leaves the top of the men’s draw defined for now by one player who has committed and one who has not. Cincinnati, meanwhile, has proceeded without either of them, reaching the quarterfinals this week with half the last eight American and Novak Djokovic and Zverev already out.
Alcaraz’s absence has been long enough that the tour has partly reorganized around it. The US Open will be the first test of whether it needs to reorganize again.
