Arthur Fils had won the first set and was serving for the second at 5-3 on Louis Armstrong Stadium on Monday night. Stefanos Tsitsipas had played him five times before and never taken a set. Fils double-faulted early in the game and then Tsitsipas broke him with a backhand driven up the line, and the match never came back.
Tsitsipas held, took the tiebreak, and lost five games across the next two sets to put out the No. 10 seed 4-6, 7-6(3), 6-1, 6-4 in two hours and 54 minutes. He is ranked No. 53 and was unseeded at the US Open for the first time in his career.
For an hour Fils had been the more dangerous player. He took the opening set 6-4 and was hitting through Tsitsipas from the back of the court much as he had in Miami in March, when he won 6-0, 6-1 in 55 minutes. Nothing in the first 70 minutes suggested the sixth would go differently.
What changed was the direction of the rallies. Tsitsipas, who had spent the first set absorbing, began finishing points himself and ended with 50 winners to Fils’s 38. From 5-3 down in the second he won 12 of the last 17 games.
“I don’t really know, I don’t have the answer,” Fils said afterwards. Asked whether the pressure of a first Masters 1000 title, the length of the season or anything physical explained it, he rejected all three. At his level, he said, a mistake like that is close to unprofessional. He described the energy going at the end of the second set and never returning.
The exit costs him more than a round. Fils won Cincinnati on Aug. 23, beating Frances Tiafoe 6-3, 1-6, 6-0 for his first Masters 1000, and the title carried him to a career-high No. 11 the following Monday, the same Monday the US Open seeding board locked. Cincinnati is the last event that counts toward the New York seedings, and Fils, seeded 21st in Ohio, turned that fortnight into a top-10 seed at a major. The seeding lasted one match.
It had looked like a reliable indicator as the Cincinnati champion has gone on to win the US Open in each of the past three years, Novak Djokovic in 2023, Jannik Sinner in 2024 and Carlos Alcaraz in 2025, and with Sinner absent this year Daniil Medvedev named Fils first when asked during the build-up who stood to gain. There is an older precedent. Stefan Edberg won Cincinnati in August 1990 and took the world No. 1 ranking with it, then lost his opening match at that year’s US Open to Alexander Volkov in straight sets.
Fils remains fifth in the ATP Live Race to Turin and is still on course to reach the season finale for the first time. Tsitsipas, who reached No. 3 in the world and two Grand Slam finals before injuries and form pushed him outside the top 50, ended a 16-month title drought at Gstaad in July and plays qualifier Lloyd Harris next. “I am speechless,” he said on court. He posted four words afterwards: remember who you are.
