Update — Aug. 24, 2026: The final went to Gauff, 6-2, 6-4, in 74 minutes. It is her second Cincinnati title and her first trophy since Wuhan last October, and it levels her head-to-head with Pegula at 5-5. Pegula matches the runner-up finish she also took here in 2024. Full report.
Update — Aug. 23, 2026: Pegula went on to beat defending champion Iga Swiatek 7-5, 4-6, 6-4 in the semifinals and meets Coco Gauff in Sunday’s final, not before 7 p.m. ET — the first all-American women’s final in Cincinnati since 1970. Full preview: Cincinnati’s last day has a final 56 years in the making.
There is no tighter way to win a tennis match than the way Jessica Pegula won this one. Across two hours and 14 minutes on Thursday evening in Mason, Ohio, she and Amanda Anisimova played 189 points, and Pegula won one more of them than her opponent did. The scoreboard read 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (4). It sent the world No. 3 into the Cincinnati Open semifinals and kept a strange, lopsided record intact: Pegula has now played Anisimova six times and won six times, and four of those six went the distance.
The margin flatters neither player and describes both. Pegula took the first set on a single break in the third game and did not face a break point in it. Anisimova, who had generated nothing on return in the opening half hour, changed that immediately after it, breaking twice at the start of the second set to lead 4-0 and levelling the match with the loss of two games. In between, at 0-3 down, Pegula left the court for a medical timeout. She did not name the problem afterward and neither did the tour, and she came back and played the next hour and a half without visible restriction.
“I know I have to try and survive,” Pegula said in her on-court interview, describing what a match against Anisimova requires of her. Survival is roughly what the third set was. Pegula broke twice to lead 3-0 and looked to have the match in hand. She was broken back twice, including while serving for it at 5-4, and then found herself down 4-3 in the tiebreak with Anisimova hitting through her. Pegula won the last four points of the match, drawing a run of forehand errors by targeting that wing repeatedly, which has been the shape of her best tennis for three years now: not overpowering opponents but arranging the rally until the mistake arrives.
It is her seventh semifinal of the season and the 15th WTA 1000 semifinal of her career, a number that says as much about longevity as form. Pegula is 32. She reached her first major final at 30. The stretch of her career that most players spend consolidating what they built in their twenties, she has spent building it, and the American summer has been the clearest demonstration of that — from the DC Open final onward she has been the most durable player in the US swing regardless of age.
Her reward is Iga Swiatek, who reached the other half of Saturday’s semifinal without completing a match. Elena Rybakina retired at 4-1 down in the first set of their quarterfinal with a left ankle injury after 31 minutes, ending both the match and her bid for the No. 1 ranking. Swiatek is defending the title she won here last year and has now won ten matches in a row across Canada and Ohio. She will be the fresher player on Saturday by a considerable distance, having spent barely half an hour on court in the quarterfinals to Pegula’s two-plus hours.
The all-American quarterfinal was the second of the week and part of a broader pattern GTN has been tracking since the round of 16. Four American women reached the Cincinnati last eight; half the combined quarterfinal field was American across both draws, and two of the men, like Pegula and Anisimova, had to eliminate each other. Madison Keys plays Sara Bejlek on Friday and Coco Gauff faces Marta Kostyuk, so the count is not final.
What the result costs Anisimova is more than a semifinal. The US Open seeding cutoff falls on Monday, Aug. 24, and Cincinnati is the last event that can move anyone. She leaves Ohio having lost a match she led by a set and a break-and-a-half of momentum, to an opponent she has never beaten, nine days before the tournament where she made the final two years ago. Pegula, meanwhile, is projected to be seeded third in New York, and has three more days here to make that projection look conservative.
