US Open, the week before the tournament: 256 players for 32 spots

The most crowded part of the US Open is played before the tournament begins. On Monday, August 24, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York, qualifying got underway for the last Grand Slam event of the season: 128 men and 128 women taking part, with sixteen spots per gender at stake in the main draw (ATP Tour; official USTA schedule as reported by Olympics.com).

The arithmetic of this week is unforgiving and worth spelling out, because it explains the structure of professional tennis better than many rankings. Going from 128 to 16 requires three consecutive round wins: seven players out of eight, for each gender, exit the tournament without having set foot in the draw the public will see. That amounts to 224 eliminations overall in a matter of days, concentrated on outer courts, against the 32 spots that will be awarded in total between the men’s and women’s events.

Early results from the courts confirm the weight of the seeded players, but only in part. British player Jacob Fearnley, fourth seed in the men’s qualifying draw, defeated Spain’s Roberto Carballés Baena 7-6(3), 6-3, with the first set decided by a tiebreak (ATP Tour; LTA). It is a detail that says something about the format: qualifying matches are best-of-three sets, and losing a single tiebreak can end a player’s American season early. It should be noted that the results available at the time of publication concern the first round and are partial: the full picture of qualifiers will only be known close to August 30.

Mixed doubles is being played in the same week, and in this year’s schedule it precedes the opening of the singles main draw. Among the pairings is the one between the team of Henry Patten and Katerina Siniakova and the team made up of Tatjana Maria and Valentin Vacherot (Olympics.com; Yahoo Sports, based on the USTA schedule). Placing the event outside the second week is a scheduling choice that brings it closer to doubles specialists and moves it away from overlapping with the singles final stages.

On the matter of source verification, one circumstance regarding the origin of the material should be noted. The primary source for the on-court results is the ATP staff release, picked up in Britain by the Lawn Tennis Association; the schedule and order of play, on the other hand, stem from official USTA documentation, which feeds both the Olympics.com report and the Yahoo Sports coverage. Scores and schedule, in other words, rest on two separate chains of sourcing, and this article distinguishes between them as it reports them.

Three dates are set by the official schedule. The main draw begins on Sunday, August 30. The women’s final is scheduled for Saturday, September 12, the men’s final for Sunday, September 13. In between lie fourteen days of matches, and the sixteen men and sixteen women who emerge from qualifying will enter the draw having already played three matches.