Naomi Osaka’s preparation for the Italian Open has taken a detour through Manhattan. The four-time Grand Slam champion, seeded 15th in Rome, is in New York City for Monday evening’s Met Gala, according to a report by The Big Lead carried by Yahoo Sports, leaving her with a tight logistical window before she has to be on clay at the Foro Italico later in the week.
The Italian Open main draw begins Tuesday, 5 May, and runs through 17 May. As one of the top 32 seeds in a 96-player WTA 1000 field, Osaka has a first-round bye — and that bye is the only reason the New York trip is feasible.
First-round matches are spread across a three-day window from 5 to 7 May, meaning Osaka will not be required on court until later in the week, when she is scheduled to play the winner of the opening-round meeting between Britain’s Katie Boulter and Germany’s Eva Lys.
The Met Gala draw
This year’s Met Gala, hosted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is themed “Costume Art,” with a dress code of “Fashion is Art.” Venus Williams is one of the celebrity co-chairs, alongside Nicole Kidman among others, lending the night a distinct tennis presence.
Osaka has Met Gala history of her own: she co-chaired the 2021 edition alongside Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish and Amanda Gorman, walking the carpet in a Louis Vuitton gown co-designed by her sister Mari that drew on her Japanese and Haitian heritage.
According to The Big Lead’s reporting, Osaka has not been seen practising at the Foro Italico in the days leading up to the draw, with the New York commitment cited as the reason.
The Big Lead is the only outlet to have published the Met Gala connection at the time of writing; Osaka’s name does not appear on the publicly confirmed Met Gala guest lists circulated by fashion outlets such as RUSSH, though those lists are routinely incomplete until the carpet itself.
A six-hour squeeze
The trip leaves little margin. Rome sits six hours ahead of New York, and Osaka will need to fly the Atlantic, recover, and acclimate to clay before her second-round opener — a notably compressed turnaround for a player whose 2025 and 2026 seasons have been marked by careful physical management since her return from maternity leave.
The clay surface itself is one Osaka has come to terms with only recently. Long described as her weakest, clay produced a breakthrough in May 2025 when she won the WTA 125 Open de Saint-Malo for her first tournament title since 2021.
That triumph fed directly into a strong Rome run last year, where she reached the fourth round before falling to American Peyton Stearns 6-4, 3-6, 7-6(4) after defeating Sara Errani, Viktorija Golubic and Marie Bouzkova.
Where Osaka sits
Now ranked inside the top 16 and seeded 15th in Rome, Osaka has rebuilt steadily through the 2025 and early 2026 seasons. Her US Open semi-final run last September, where she eventually fell short but spoke openly about how far she had come since giving birth in 2023, marked the most visible signpost of her return to the upper end of the tour. Rome will be her last serious clay tune-up before Roland Garros, which begins on 24 May.
Looking ahead
Whether the Met Gala detour proves a costly distraction or a calculated indulgence will turn on what Osaka does in her opening match later in the week. Boulter, fresh from a quarter-final run in Rouen and a win at the Madrid Open, and Lys, a German now ranked inside the top 40, both present credible threats to a player who will arrive in Italy with limited time on the practice courts. For an athlete who has long blurred the line between sport and culture, however, the bigger statement of the day may simply be that she felt able to do both.
