If not for Carlos Alcaraz’s deltoid exhibition, his irrepressible fluidity, and the occasional choice Spanish murmuring, all 24,000 of us at Arthur Ashe Stadium might’ve sworn that the young man lolling around the court last week was a bad impersonator. Out-moved, out-volleyed, out-served, out-gunned. Carlitos? Infeasible. Even in a loss, he’s bound to pull a little magic out of that racket; flutter those wings by his heel. Not in straight sets, not to a Dutch journeyman who’d made only one career Grand Slam quarterfinal, not the buoyant Spaniard going all out quietly into the starless night. Prodigy doesn’t have to always equal perfection, but the end result shouldn’t be whatever that was. Until, of course, those rare upside-down evenings when it actually might be, when anything can tumble.
Lightning struck again the very next night. Novak Djokovic fell in four sets. The most immovable object to ever grace a court met some little known Aussie force and lost. Djokovic dropped the first two sets. Then he snatched one back. Play the match 100 times and 99 of them end with the big Serb on top. This was that one in the hundred. Around hour no. 3, he’d toppled over onto his backside, and the world’s biggest tennis stadium welled with stunned patrons, moving to its aisles.
This is the kind of territory where things tend to come in threes. So an even bigger meltdown puddled, once more, the following night. Another defending champion, too. Coco Gauff arrived in Flushing prepared for a drawn-out fight but not the opponent: herself. Fourteen winners to 19 double-faults. By the end of the match, on every serve, folks in the media section began to cover their eyes. At 19 she dispatched everything in her path to capture the U.S. Open title—the first Grand Slam victory in a likely decades-long reign. A year later, at 20, she trips over her own feet.
Hell’s going on? Is it the water? The shoes? Why are the most bankable stars at this year’s U.S. Open dropping like over-vexed fireflies?
Add a two-time U.S. Open women’s champ and the current men’s world no. 4 to the pile. Wednesday might bring a 1-seed to boot. The whole joint’s getting topsy-turvy. Not saying that is or ain’t good. The vibes on the ground and in the ether about the 2024 U.S. Open are that the People’s Tournament has never been more unpredictable, never been more baffling, and never been more wide-open. What that’ll ultimately mean and how we got here are two sides of the same coin.
There is a school of thought that the upheaval of this U.S. Open is partly tied to the burdens of a more taxing Olympic-year schedule for top pros. A part of this is anecdotal in nature: on the men’s side, Alcaraz and Djokovic met in the Olympic singles final and both conspicuously flamed out of the Open three weeks later. In the wake of each loss, both players mentioned the mental and physical toll that their compressed schedules had on their performance in Flushing. In hindsight there’s smoke and fire in the claim. All of the competitors who made the men’s singles semifinals in Paris exited the U.S. Open by or before the third round of the tournament. The only woman who reached the Olympic semis and hasn’t been eliminated in Queens is no. 1–seeded Iga Swiatek. (Women’s silver and gold medalists Donna Vekic and Zheng Qinwen, were eliminated in the fourth round and quarterfinals of the Open.)
If you widen the scope of that analysis to include the Wimbledon semifinalists the results are even more jarring: the farthest anyone who made this year’s Wimbledon women’s semifinals got at the 2024 U.S. Open is the round of 16. The only man to have made the Wimbledon semifinals and not been eliminated by the third round of this year’s Open is Daniil Medvedev, who’ll have to weather a slugfest with top-ranked (and reported clostebol-flirt) at Ashe on Wednesday night. Not only is there a reasonable case to be made that immediate Grand Slam and Olympic success is a drag on U.S. Open performance—in this context it starts to feel like less of a coincidence that so many of the apex players of their era failed to win Olympic golds in the same years when they were most dominant on tour.
And things look even more random when you track the results of the major spoilers in this year’s Open. Both of the players who eliminated Alcaraz and Djokovic were eliminated in the very next round. (On the women’s side Emma Navarro, who beat Coco Gauff on Saturday, is in the semifinal). For Alcaraz, this amounted to the biggest failure of his sensational career, his earliest Grand Slam loss in three years, and an unworthy, if shocking, capper to a year in which he won a French Open and Wimbledon title. Djokovic’s third-round loss in Flushing sealed his first season without a Grand Slam victory in seven years (one of just three seasons he’s had in the past decade and a half!)—and, at 37, marked another precious chance at extending and solidifying his record Grand Slam total. Gauff, at 20 is the youngest of the top eliminated seeds across both brackets, the least solidified in her side of the sport, and the only one of the three to not come away with either a Grand Slam or gold medal this year.
How much this matters going forward is inconclusive. I wouldn’t bet against any of these folks coming back and taking home trophies in Melbourne in four months, and the wise money is on it being a blip in their respective careers.
If you’re struggling to understand what this year’s tournament says in the context of U.S. Open history the answer is: very little. Similarly to other Grand Slams, in Flushing, past success generally begets future victory—particularly in the men’s game. Forty out of the past 45 U.S. Open men’s champions are either repeat winners or made multiple finals runs during their career. Since Serena’s three-peat in the 2010s, eight of the past nine U.S. Open women’s singles champs were first-time winners of the tournament; before that run started in 2015, the same four women won 13 of the previous 16 tournaments (and eight of those trophies went to the same family). Like history, U.S. Open champs don’t always repeat but they do tend to rhyme.
Across the courts at Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and on TVs around our sports-watching nation, the upsets at this year’s tournament haven’t really even thrown a tangible damper on the festivities. 2024 Open attendance totals have broken tournament records for another consecutive year. Ratings for the tournament remain stable enough for ESPN to sign a 12-year broadcast extension. Rolex sponsorship dollars are still evergreen. The courtyards and fountains on-hand are packed. Beaucoup linen button-downs and drinks with suspended honeydew tennis balls.
It’s tempting to frame this whole thing as a win for parity in tennis generally, but recent Grand Slam history just doesn’t bear that out. Only three men not named “Carlos Alcaraz” have broken through the late-stage reign of the Big Three at any Grand Slams since 2020. On the women’s side Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka have captured six out of the past 10 major titles. No one else has so much as repeated.
This weekend’s results may end up reinforcing those trends, contradicting them, or something in between. There are still real and imagined villains to choose from or watch tumble across both brackets; moments bound to leave us marveling or livid or confused. The only certainty in this year’s People’s Tournament is uncertainty. Truth is, you’ll probably tune in, but you’re likely to shake your head as you do.
