Frances Tiafoe was supposed to open the US Open Mixed Doubles Championship on Arthur Ashe Stadium on Tuesday afternoon, across the net from the top seeds, in front of the first big crowd of the tournament. Instead he is not in the building’s draw at all. The tournament announced Monday that Tiafoe had withdrawn from the event with an injury, two days after he lost the Cincinnati Open final and six days before the singles main draw begins.
Neither Tiafoe nor his team has said what the injury is, how long it has been a problem, or what it means for the fortnight that starts Sunday. That silence is the story. A player does not reach a Masters 1000 final one night and disappear from a two-day event the next unless something is being managed, and the absence of a diagnosis six days out from a home Grand Slam is a larger fact than the withdrawal itself.
The consequences landed on the draw immediately. Tiafoe had partnered Leylah Fernandez on a wild card, a pairing the Canadian pushed for herself after reaching the women’s doubles quarterfinals here last year with Venus Williams. The two were drawn against Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic, the top seeds, in the first match of the day. With Tiafoe out, Fernandez has no partner and no place in the field, and Sabalenka and Djokovic instead face Katerina Siniakova and Henry Patten, the No. 1-ranked doubles players on their respective tours, who came through Monday’s qualifying. The vacated slot went to Kristina Mladenovic and Marcelo Arevalo, who had lost in qualifying and now play Karolina Muchova and Jakub Mensik. One withdrawal turned the tournament’s easiest first-round assignment into its hardest.
For Tiafoe the timing is worse than the paperwork suggests. He arrived in Cincinnati having retired from his third-round match in Montreal earlier this month, after which he said surgeons had removed a cyst from his right hand that had been causing problems for some time. He then put together the best week of his hard-court summer: past Brandon Nakashima in an all-American semifinal, into a second Cincinnati final, beaten there by Arthur Fils in three sets. That run was read as a player peaking into New York. It now reads differently.
He has done this before, and that is part of why the withdrawal registers. Tiafoe has retired mid-match or pulled out of events in each of the last three seasons, and he has spent much of his career being described as a player whose body arrives at majors already taxed. He is also in the stretch of a career where a fourth ATP title and a Halle win over Taylor Fritz in June suggested the opposite — that he had found a way to arrive intact. The US Open is the tournament that made him. He reached the semifinals here in 2022 and again in 2024, the deepest runs of his career, and no American man has been closer to a home final in the last decade.
What he is not, as of Tuesday morning, is out of the singles draw. There has been no announcement, no replacement on the entry list, and no statement from his camp. Withdrawing from a two-day mixed doubles event is the cheapest possible way to protect a body before a best-of-five fortnight, and it is at least as likely to be a precaution as a signal. The tournament’s own language was limited to an injury and nothing further.
The men’s field around him has already thinned. Jannik Sinner is out with a knee injury, Holger Rune has postponed his comeback rather than restart it at a major, Jack Draper is gone, and Joao Fonseca withdrew Monday with an abdominal problem. Carlos Alcaraz returns from four months out with a wrist injury and plays mixed doubles on Tuesday as his first competitive tennis since April. A draw that was supposed to be the deepest of the year is being assembled out of who is standing.
Tiafoe’s place in that draw will be settled one way or the other before Friday, when the singles draws are made. Until then the record shows a player who withdrew from one event, said nothing about another, and left the tournament to announce what little it knew. On Tuesday afternoon, the match he was meant to play will go on without him, and the top seeds will find out what a genuine doubles team looks like from the other side of the net.
