Arthur Fils lost six games in a row in the middle of Sunday’s Cincinnati Open final. He then won nine of the last 10, and France’s 12-year wait for a Masters 1000 champion ended with them. Fils beat Frances Tiafoe 6-3, 1-6, 6-0 in one hour and 28 minutes to win the biggest title of his career and his first at Masters 1000 level. It is his fifth on tour and his second of 2026 after Barcelona, and it lifts him to a career-high No. 11 in the world and No. 5 in the ATP Race.
He is the seventh French man to win a Masters 1000 title and the first since Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at Toronto in 2014. He is the youngest French champion in the event’s history, the second Frenchman to win Cincinnati after Guy Forget in 1991, and the second man born in 2004 or later to win at this level, after Jakub Mensik at Miami last year.
The match did not look like any of that for a stretch in the middle. Fils took the opening set with almost nothing going wrong, dropping only a handful of points behind his serve and breaking twice. Then his level fell away, Tiafoe’s rose, and the American took a 3-0 lead in the second on a crowd that had been waiting all week for exactly that. Tiafoe forced a decider.
Whatever was going to happen in the third had a complication attached. Tiafoe took a medical timeout before it began, receiving treatment on his upper left leg and lower back. He did not win a game after it. Fils finished the match having converted four of his eight break-point chances. “It’s been a tough last year,” Fils said at the trophy ceremony. “I didn’t play the French Open. I lost early in Washington. People think that I’m done. But here we are. I got the title.”
The line has some grounding. Fils reached a career-high No. 14 in April 2025 and then lost roughly half a year to injury, returning to a ranking that had drifted into the twenties. He came into Cincinnati at No. 21. He leaves it one place outside the top 10, and beat the world No. 10, Flavio Cobolli, in Saturday’s semifinal to get to the final in the first place.
For Tiafoe this is a second Masters 1000 final defeat, after losing the 2024 Cincinnati final to Jannik Sinner. That he was in this one at all is the more remarkable half of the week. He retired from his third-round match in Montreal on Aug. 7 and said afterward that surgeons had removed a cyst from his right hand that had been causing problems for some time. Seventeen days later he beat Learner Tien, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Lorenzo Musetti and Brandon Nakashima to reach a final. He finishes the tournament with 37 match wins in 2026, the third-most on tour behind Alexander Zverev and Sinner.
The final was also, according to the Associated Press, the first Masters 1000 championship match contested by two Black players. Fils becomes the third Black man to win one, after Ben Shelton, who has won twice in Canada, and Tsonga, who won Paris in 2008 and Toronto in 2014.
Fils is now 2-0 against Tiafoe and has not lost to an American opponent since the start of 2025. Neither man gets much of a pause. The US Open main draw begins Sunday, Aug. 30, into a men’s field already reshaped by Sinner’s withdrawal and Carlos Alcaraz’s return from four months out with a wrist injury. Fils is scheduled to appear at the “Stars of the Open” exhibition at Arthur Ashe Stadium on Thursday night, three days before the draw opens.
Tiafoe has reached the US Open semifinals twice, in 2022 and 2024, and has said repeatedly that it is the tournament that matters most to him. He arrives in New York having played the best week of his season and lost the last set of it 6-0.
