Stefanos Tsitsipas lost the opening set on Friday, and then he went after Jiri Lehecka’s second serve and did not let go of it. By the end he had reached the fourth round of the US Open for the first time in his career, beating the 18th seed 2-6, 6-1, 7-6(3), 6-1. The second serve decided the match. Lehecka won 17 of the 42 points he played behind his, a shade over 40 percent, and double-faulted six times.
Tsitsipas took 25 of the 42 he faced, close to 60 percent, and won 27 of 45 behind his own. Both men landed 59 percent of their first serves and both won 72 percent of the points behind them, so the separation came almost entirely from what happened after the first one missed.
The ace column said the same thing from the other direction. Tsitsipas served 12 to Lehecka’s three, and the third-set tiebreak turned on two of them hit back to back. Lehecka answered with a double fault and a run of misfired ground strokes, and Tsitsipas took the breaker 7-3 for a two-sets-to-one lead. From 2-6 down he won 19 of the last 27 games, and broke Lehecka five times in nine chances across the match.
The result matters more for where it sits in a career than for where it sits in the draw. Tsitsipas is 28, ranked 53rd, and arrived in New York unseeded at a Grand Slam for the first time. He has played two major finals and been ranked No. 3 in the world, and until Friday the US Open was the one place where none of that had ever shown. This was his ninth main-draw appearance in New York, and his previous best was the third round, reached in 2020 and again in 2021.
The rebuild behind the run is recent. Tsitsipas parted with his father Apostolos, who had coached him for his entire professional career, and now works with Patrick Mouratoglou and Thomas Perrin. He also said the back trouble that wrecked his 2025 season has gone, and that waking up without pain has changed what he is able to ask of himself in practice.
He has taken the long road through this draw. He beat Arthur Fils, the 10th seed and the Cincinnati champion, in the first round from a set and a break down, having lost all five previous meetings between them. He then spent three and a half hours getting past the qualifier Lloyd Harris. He has now dropped the opening set in all three of his matches here and won all three.
The crowd was with him, which has not always been the case in New York. “You carried me through this match,” he told an on-court interviewer who had raised the volume of support from the city’s large Greek-American contingent.
Tsitsipas will play Ben Shelton in the fourth round on Sunday. The eighth seed came through Friday’s night session against Denis Shapovalov 7-6(3), 6-7(5), 6-3, 6-4, finishing on Arthur Ashe Stadium at 2:15 a.m. after a three-hour wait to get on court. Lehecka, a quarterfinalist here last year, leaves with 41 unforced errors against 22 winners. Tsitsipas finished with 34 winners and 30 errors, and won 115 of the 211 points played.
