NEW YORK – High-ranked Aryna Sabalenka and 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic have been added to the highest of the preliminary checklist of 16 groups to compete within the US Open Combined Doubles Championship.
The event was overhauled final yr to provide prime singles gamers an opportunity to compete, with a $1 million prize going to the winner. The crew introduced by the USA Tennis Affiliation on Monday included lots of most of these stars.
2025 runners-up Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud will re-enter, as will Jelena Rybakina and Taylor Fritz, the Japanese duo Naomi Osaka and Kei Nishikori, and Jessica Pegula and Jack Draper.
The event can be held over two days, August twenty fifth and twenty sixth, with all matches being held at Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium, the 2 main venues for the US Open, and can be televised on ESPN’s services.
Groups can enter till August seventeenth, at which level the highest six groups within the total singles rankings will robotically qualify for the principle occasion. This implies Sabalenka, the two-time U.S. Open girls’s champion, and Djokovic, who continues to be fifth on the lads’s tour at age 39, will be capable to compete safely.
The USTA will award wild playing cards to eight groups, with the remaining two groups competing in a qualifying event to be held on August twenty fourth.
The remaining groups entered as of Monday are:
Mila Andreeva and Andrei Rublev, Belinda Bencic and Flavio Coboly, Diana Schneider and Daniil Medvedev, Amanda Anisimova and Lerner Tien, Alex Ila and Felix Auger-Aliassime, Leila Fernandez and Fla Siblings of Ncis Tiafoe, Taylor Townsend and Alexander Zverev, Elena-Gabriella Ruse and Nuno Borges, Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassoli, Katerina Sinakova, Henry Patten, and Peyton Stearns and Preston Stearns.
Errani and Vavassoli are two-time U.S. Open champions. Final yr’s Italians ranked so low in singles that they wanted a wild card to qualify, and this yr would be the similar.
The US Open was initially criticized final yr as a result of the format of the occasion shut out doubles specialists like Errani and Vavassoli, however the event actually appeared like a hit, drawing 78,000 followers to the venue and promoting out each days of the Ashes.
“Any time we are able to put men and women on the identical crew, we are able to deliver out our greatest tennis, and that is precisely what the Combined Doubles Championship does,” USTA CEO Craig Tiley mentioned in a press release.
“The Combined Doubles Championship is an innovation that may entice new audiences and provides our followers one other alternative to look at our massive stars compete collectively.”
Errani and Vavassoli have been the one conventional doubles crew finally yr’s event. Sinakova and Patten are doubles specialists and can have much more alternatives this yr with the addition of an eight-team qualifying event, together with six direct entry groups and two wild playing cards.
The format can be three-set matches with 4 video games every, a tie-break at 4-all, and a 10-point match tie-break rather than the third set, as much as the semi-finals. The finals can be normal scoring with units of as much as 6 video games and tie-breaks at 6-all, with 10-point match tie-breaks if obligatory.
