Update — Aug. 21, 2026: Resolved. Sinner withdrew from the US Open on Friday, saying through his team that the right knee needed more time than the calendar allowed. It is the first Grand Slam he has missed since his debut at this tournament in 2019. His team’s release names the Asian swing, and the events in Beijing and Shanghai, as the target for a return; no date has been given and nothing has been confirmed. This page is retired as a live fitness tracker and is retained below as a record of the timeline as it stood before the decision.
Jannik Sinner turns 25 on Sunday, and he will mark it in Monte Carlo with his family rather than on a match court in Ohio. That detail frames where the world No. 1 sits two weeks out from the US Open more usefully than any medical bulletin: 49 days will have passed between his last competitive point and the first day of the main draw at Flushing Meadows on Aug. 30.
Sinner has not played since the Wimbledon final on July 12, when he beat Alexander Zverev in four sets to defend his title. He skipped the Canadian Open in Montreal, as he did in 2025, and then withdrew from the Cincinnati Open on Aug. 9 with a right knee problem, a decision that removed the tournament’s top seed nine days before the main draw and left the Masters 1000 without either of the two men who have dominated the season. “I’m now focusing on getting ready for the US Open,” he said in the statement announcing it.
What has followed has been a rehabilitation program conducted almost entirely out of public view. Reporting in La Gazzetta dello Sport places Sinner at the J Medical facility in Turin through Friday, completing shockwave therapy on the inflamed area under a plan set out by Gianluca Melegati, the sports medicine specialist who examined him in Milan earlier this month. The same reporting has him flying to the United States on Monday or Tuesday, which would leave roughly a dozen days of training in New York before play begins.
None of that has been confirmed by Sinner or his team. No travel date has been announced, no practice schedule published, and the only formal statement from his side remains the Cincinnati withdrawal. He is entered on the US Open list and nothing has been said to suggest that will change, but a travel plan described in a newspaper is a plan rather than a commitment, and the distinction matters in a summer when two of the game’s biggest names have already lost months to injury.
The absence is unusual in its shape more than its length. Sinner has taken breaks before, but this one removes every hard-court tune-up from his calendar. The players he expects to meet in the second week in New York are, at this moment, playing matches in humidity in Mason, Ohio, which is the closest approximation of Flushing Meadows conditions the calendar offers. Novak Djokovic played one of those matches on Saturday and was physically overwhelmed by the heat before losing to Thiago Agustin Tirante, an outcome that argued for match preparation and against it in the same afternoon.
Cincinnati carries its own history here. Sinner reached the 2025 final and retired while trailing Carlos Alcaraz, unwell in comparable conditions, a year after winning the title. Returning to Ohio was the plan his team was still working to in early August, and the knee changed it.
Alcaraz’s situation runs in parallel and is, if anything, less settled. He has not played since withdrawing from the Barcelona Open in April with a wrist injury, missed Roland Garros and Wimbledon, pulled out of Cincinnati and has still not confirmed a return date, with the Winston-Salem Open, which begins Aug. 23, raised as a possible last tune-up. Absent that, neither man will have played a competitive hard-court match all summer.
For Sinner, the season to this point has been the most productive of his career and the most physically expensive. He won five consecutive Masters 1000 titles and completed the career Golden Masters, the youngest man to do so since the series began in 1990, then went out in the second round at Roland Garros before defending Wimbledon five weeks later. That accumulation is why the knee is being managed rather than simply treated, and why his team has been willing to surrender two hard-court events to protect it.
What waits in New York is a title he won in 2024 and lost in four sets to Alcaraz a year later. He is not the defending champion, and there is a narrow comfort in that. The harder arithmetic is everything the last seven weeks have not tested: match sharpness, the heat of a New York afternoon, and the demand of seven best-of-five rounds across a fortnight. On current evidence, the first time any of it is examined under pressure will be the day it counts.
