Stefanos Tsitsipas plays tennis the old way, a one-handed backhand and a full-blooded charge to the net, and for a while he looked like the future. At 21 he won the 2019 ATP Finals, the youngest champion of the season-ending event since Lleyton Hewitt in 2001, outlasting Dominic Thiem in a final-set tiebreak. By August 2021 he was world No. 3, the highest ranking any Greek player has held, and he has gathered 14 career titles.
The majors are the wound. In the 2021 Roland Garros final he led Novak Djokovic by two sets and lost in five, the first two-set lead Djokovic had ever overturned in a slam final. Djokovic beat him again in the 2023 Australian Open final, with the world No. 1 ranking riding on the result. Since then the slide has been steep: a back injury broke up his 2025 season, and by mid-2026 his ranking had sunk to its lowest point since early 2018. The talent was never the question. The climb back is.
Four. That is how many US Open titles Novak Djokovic has already won, and the draw made on 27 August 2026 puts him on course to meet Carlos Alcaraz, the defending champion who also won the title in 2022, in the semi-final. Both are seeded in the same half of the 128-player field; play starts on 30 August.
Draw taleTwenty-two years. That is how long it has been since Lleyton Hewitt won the title in Washington, and this week his son came through qualifying into the main draw of the same tournament. Cruz Hewitt is 17, ranked outside the top 600, and plays Marcos Giron in the first round. It is his first ATP main draw, and it is a smaller novelty than it sounds. The tour is thick with players whose surname arrived before they did.
Feature