Cincinnati, Djokovic eliminated by Tirante in a draw without Sinner and Alcaraz

The tally of absences, in Cincinnati, arrived before the results. The men’s and women’s tournament in Mason, Ohio, is being played from August 13 to 23 at the Lindner Family Tennis Center with 96-player singles draws, and it opened without Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, sidelined by knee and wrist problems respectively; in the women’s tournament, Jasmine Paolini and Emma Raducanu withdrew (Olympics.com). An event of this category losing at the outset the two players at the top of the men’s hierarchy changes in nature: the draw stops being a predictable obstacle course and becomes open ground for those who, ordinarily, exit before the weekend.

Confirmation came from the heaviest result of the opening days. Argentina’s Thiago Agustin Tirante beat Novak Djokovic 2-6 6-4 6-4, coming back after a one-sided first set (ATP Tour). It is the kind of match that North American hard-court tournaments produce regularly: heat, fast ball, high tempo and an opponent with nothing to defend in the rankings. For Djokovic, the defeat comes against a player who built his career on clay and who remains a marginal figure on the circuit on hard courts.

Not all seeds followed the same script. Alexander Zverev, the top seed in the draw, defeated Cameron Norrie 3-6 6-3 6-3, in a pattern mirroring Djokovic’s match: an initial set lost, then two sets under control. Australia’s Alex de Minaur and the Czech Republic’s Jakub Mensik also reached the third round, while Spain’s Rafael Jodar eliminated Denis Shapovalov 7-5 4-6 7-5, saving a match point. These are the results that the men’s circuit’s official website records as settled: none of them, taken individually, redraws the hierarchy, but together they describe a tournament in which the margin between favorites and outsiders has narrowed.

It is worth isolating what the two main results have in common, because it matters more than the individual score. The day’s two comebacks — Tirante over Djokovic, Zverev over Norrie — both stem from a lost opening set and are decided in three sets: in the first case the favorite did not recover, in the second he did. On the structure of the 96-player draw, the sources consulted indicate the number of participants and nothing else, and on this the newspaper adds no hypotheses.

On the women’s side, the tournament enters the phase in which the top names begin to cross paths. The schedule indicates for Monday, August 17, the match between the United States’ Coco Gauff and Russia’s Liudmila Samsonova, noted both in the tournament preview and in the sports schedule published by Championat. At the time this analysis was published the outcome is not available and the figure remains a scheduling one, not a result: the clarification is warranted because on an ongoing tournament every figure holds for the moment it is written.

A question remains open that the press releases do not clarify: on the recovery timelines for Sinner and Alcaraz, the sources consulted report their unavailability for the Ohio tournament, not a forecast for their return. On this the newspaper has no further elements and builds none.

The tournament continues until August 23. In the coming rounds, Zverev, de Minaur and Mensik are the only players among those mentioned to still have an open path in the men’s draw.

Sources: ATP Tour (official results), Olympics.com (schedule and participants), Championat (sports schedule).