Which leaves Sabalenka: Since winning the Australian at the top of the year, she’s had injury setbacks and few victories to show—save for an utterly dominant performance at that Cincinnati warmup. She couldn’t be peaking at a better time, and—barring the kind of mental and emotional setbacks or wild cards which are always a possibility with Sabalenka—would seem to be the favorite to take home her first Open title and avenge her defeat at the hands of Gauff last year.
Regardless of who wins, though, there are some first-round matches that are every bit worth your while. Watch for Jelena Ostapenko, the master of dark strategies and quirky gamesmanship, vs. a Naomi Osaka who still seems to be struggling to find her form after her return to the tour—or the buoyant Jasmine Paolini vs. Bianca Andreescu, also returned to the tour after a devastating ankle injury last year.
As for the men, it’s turned into a bit of a quandary. After much bemoaning of the fact that, for literally decades, tennis was dominated almost solely by the so-called Big Three (Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal), we now find ourselves with…a different version of the big three (though this installment hasn’t yet earned the capital letters of the former). Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and, yes, Djokovic—the defending champion at the Open—have mostly locked down the major titles of recent seasons, and will likely do so for some time: Though all have had injuries (and in Djokovic’s case, a surgery), all seem healthy now. So who’s going to win the Open?
Each of the players comes with a micro backstory of the moment. For Djokovic, it’s one of triumph at the Olympics—he finally won that gold medal, the single prize of tennis that had until then eluded him. Since that, though, he’s taken some time off and away from the warmup tournaments, so he’s a bit of a wild card in terms of positioning for the Open. Alcaraz’s story is one of mostly epic dominance—save for an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Gael Monfils in Cincinnati, which seemed to have truly rattled him. All eyes on him, then, to see how he navigates New York, both physically and emotionally.