Jannik Sinner will not play the US Open. The world No. 1 said Friday that the right knee injury that has kept him off a match court since Wimbledon has not healed in time, removing the top-ranked man in tennis from the final major of the season nine days before the main draw opens at Flushing Meadows.
In a statement issued through his team, Sinner said he and his medical staff had made a difficult decision and that he will “not be able to compete at the US Open this year.” He said he had been back on court in Monte Carlo in recent days and had come away understanding that the knee needed more time than the calendar was going to give it.
The last competitive point Sinner played was the Wimbledon final on July 12, where he beat Alexander Zverev for a fifth major title. He has not played since. He withdrew from the Cincinnati Open on Aug. 9, citing the same right knee, having already skipped the National Bank Open in Montreal, and he spent the fortnight the rest of the field spent in Ohio training in Monaco instead. By the time the US Open begins on Aug. 30, 49 days will have passed since he last hit a ball that counted.
The timing is unusually cruel in its symmetry. On Thursday, Carlos Alcaraz — out since April with a wrist injury, absent from Roland Garros and Wimbledon — confirmed he would defend his US Open title. Twenty-four hours later the man he beat in last year’s final was gone. The two have not been in the same draw since the spring, and they will not be in this one either.
What Sinner forfeits is considerable. He won the US Open in 2024 and reached the final again in 2025, losing to Alcaraz in four sets, and those runner-up points come off his total when the tournament is over. His hold on the No. 1 ranking is not in question — he entered the North American swing more than 4,000 points clear of the field and no result in New York can close that gap in a fortnight — but the margin will narrow, and it will narrow again in October if the recovery runs long. It is the first Grand Slam he has missed since making his debut at this tournament in 2019.
The immediate consequence is a men’s draw with a different shape. Alcaraz becomes the highest-ranked player in the field, which places the defending champion at the top of a bracket he will enter without a single warm-up match. Zverev, the French Open champion, and Novak Djokovic, still one major short of a record 25th, both move up a line. The official seeding board does not publish until Monday, Aug. 24, after the Cincinnati final, so the numbers stay provisional until then.
Sinner’s season had been, until the knee, close to total. The ATP records him at 44-3 for the year with six titles, including the first five Masters 1000 events of the season at Indian Wells, Miami, Monte-Carlo, Madrid and Rome, and Wimbledon on top of them. He is a 30-time tour-level champion at 25. The record he leaves 2026 with will now be missing the one tournament where he has been most consistently dangerous on hard courts.
According to the release from his team, the plan is to stay in Europe and continue rehabilitation with his medical and performance staff, with the Asian swing and the events in Beijing and Shanghai as the target for a return. That is a target, not a commitment, and nothing in the statement puts a date on it.
He is not the only significant absence. The entry list published in July has been thinning steadily on both sides of the draw, and the tournament that begins in nine days will be missing several of the names that headlined it. What it has instead, at least for now, is a Cincinnati weekend in which American men are two wins from a title nobody in this country has won in two decades, and a returning champion in New York with everything to prove and nothing to measure himself against.
