Two Cities, One Trophy: Why the Canadian Open Moves House Every Year

The draw for the biggest tennis tournament in Canada was made twice this morning, in two different cities, an hour apart. At eleven, in Montreal, the men's names came out of the pot. At noon, in Toronto, the women's. Same tournament, same sponsor, same trophies, same fortnight. Two buildings, and about five hours of highway in between.

If you follow tennis casually — if you are the sort of fan who watches the big weeks, loves the drama, and has never once thought about the ITF rulebook — that arrangement sounds like an administrative mistake nobody got round to fixing. It is not. It is deliberate, it is more than four decades old, and it is one of the quiet reasons the Canadian Open feels different from every other stop on the calendar.

Here is what is actually happening between 1 and 13 August, and why a tournament that cannot decide where it lives has turned that indecision into its greatest asset.

One tournament, two homes

The National Bank Open is a single event with two halves. In 2026 the women play at Sobeys Stadium, on the York University campus in the north end of Toronto. The men play at IGA Stadium, in Jarry Park in Montreal. Next year the two swap. The year after that they swap back. They have been doing this, back and forth, since the early 1980s.

Nowhere else in tennis does this. The Australian Open does not spend odd years in Sydney. Indian Wells does not decamp to San Diego when it feels like a change. Every other big tournament on the calendar has one address, one set of gates, one skyline behind the show court. Canada has two of everything, and swaps them on a permanent rota, so that neither Toronto nor Montreal ever has to be the city that lost.

For a country this size, that logic is hard to argue with. Canada is enormous and its two biggest urban regions sit at opposite ends of a corridor, culturally as well as geographically. One tournament in one city would have made the other city a spectator for ever. Splitting the event was the compromise, and the compromise worked so well that it became the identity.

The practical effect is that this is the only major event in the sport where the crowd changes language halfway through the draw. In Montreal you get the bilingual roar, the "allez" that lands half a beat before the English "come on", the sense of a European tennis crowd that somehow ended up in North America. In Toronto you get one of the most multicultural sporting audiences anywhere on earth: flags for players from countries that have never staged a professional tournament, entire sections that adopt an unseeded qualifier because his grandparents came from the same place as theirs. Same tournament. Completely different room.

How a Victorian club match became a Masters event

The Canadian Open is old. Genuinely, startlingly old. It was first played in 1881, organised at the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club, and it is usually described as the third-oldest tournament in the sport, behind only Wimbledon and the US Open. A women's event followed in 1892. Tennis was still a lawn game for people with time on their hands, played in long sleeves, and Canada had a national championship before most of the countries that dominate the sport today had a tennis association.

It stayed amateur until the late 1960s, turned professional in 1968 with the rest of the sport, and moved off clay onto hard courts in 1979. Until 1980 it was a Toronto event. From 1981 the men and women were split between the two cities on the alternating cycle that still runs today, and the tournament grew from a national championship into one of the nine biggest events on the men's tour and one of the biggest on the women's.

It has changed names almost as often as it has changed cities. Older fans still call it the Rogers Cup, which is what it was until the title sponsorship passed to National Bank in 2021, and plenty of people simply call it the Canadian Open regardless of what is written on the backdrop. It has also stretched. What used to be a tight seven-day sprint now runs for the best part of a fortnight, which changed the tournament in ways that matter more to spectators than to players: there are more days of tennis, the first week is cheaper and calmer, and you can now go on a Sunday in early August and watch four hours of top-100 players for the price of a decent dinner.

That history is worth holding in your head when you watch this week, because it explains something about the atmosphere. This is not a manufactured event dropped into a market by a broadcaster. It has been played, in one form or another, for close to a century and a half. The people in those stands have grandparents who went.

The champions who can never go back

Now for the genuinely strange consequence of the two-city system, and the thing that makes this tournament unlike any other: a defending champion here never defends in the same building.

Ben Shelton won the men's title last year in Toronto, beating Karen Khachanov 6-7(5), 6-4, 7-6(3) in a final he had no business winning from a set down. It was his first Masters 1000 title, and it made him the youngest American man to win one since Andy Roddick in Miami in 2004. He arrives in Montreal this week as defending champion of a tournament he has never played in Montreal. The court will be the same size. Nothing else will be familiar — not the walk from the locker room, not the shadows in the late afternoon, not the way the wind comes across the top of the stand. He is defending a title in a city where he has no memories to defend.

The women's side has the mirror image of that story, and it is a sadder one. Victoria Mboko won last year in Montreal at eighteen years old, having started the season ranked 333rd in the world. She came in as a wild card and beat four Grand Slam champions on the way to the trophy: Sofia Kenin, Coco Gauff, Elena Rybakina, and then Naomi Osaka in the final, 2-6, 6-4, 6-1, after losing the first set in front of a home crowd that could barely breathe. Only Monica Seles in 1995 had won this title as a wild card before her. Mboko finished that fortnight as the highest-ranked Canadian woman on tour.

She will not be in Toronto. A knee injury picked up on the grass at Queen's in June has ruled her out, and she announced it herself, plainly, on Instagram — disappointed above all that she would not get to play in front of a Canadian crowd. She would not have been going back to Montreal anyway. Her title defence was always going to be in a different city, in a different stadium, in front of a different crowd. The injury took the rest.

There is something quietly poignant in that. In most sports, going back to defend a title means going back to the room where you won it. Here, the room does not wait for you. The tournament packs up and moves on, and you follow it wherever it went.

Montreal without its headliners

The men's field this year is missing three enormous names, and it is worth being honest about that rather than pretending otherwise.

Carlos Alcaraz has been out since a wrist injury in April, a lay-off that has already cost him Roland Garros and Wimbledon. Jannik Sinner, the world number one, and Novak Djokovic both withdrew on 24 July, a week before the start, citing workload and the need to arrive at the US Open in one piece. Both had played deep into Wimbledon, meeting in the semi-finals on 10 July, with Sinner going on to win the final two days later. Three weeks later they were being asked to play best-of-three on hard courts in Canada, then Cincinnati, then a Grand Slam. They said no.

The tournament director did not hide his frustration, and you can understand why: a Masters 1000 event sells tickets months in advance on the promise of the very best players, and losing three of the biggest draws in the sport with seven days to go is a commercial bruise. For Sinner it was the second year running — he missed Toronto last summer with an elbow problem picked up at Wimbledon.

This is now one of the loudest arguments in tennis. The calendar has grown, the big events have stretched from one week to nearly two, and the players at the very top are being asked to be everywhere. Something gives, and what usually gives is the event that sits in the awkward gap between a Slam that just finished and a Slam about to start.

So what is actually left in Montreal? A great deal, as it turns out. Alexander Zverev, the 2026 Roland Garros champion, is the top seed and arrives as the most decorated man in the draw — a player who spent years being told he could not win the biggest matches and then won one of the biggest of all on the clay in Paris. Felix Auger-Aliassime is seeded second, and if you want a story with some romance in it, a Canadian winning this title in Montreal would be the loudest thing that has happened in Canadian tennis in years. Alex de Minaur, Daniil Medvedev and Shelton fill out the top five.

There is a case, too, that a thinned field is not the disaster the ticket office fears. The very best players are so far ahead of everyone else at the moment that the biggest events have started to feel a little predetermined; take three of them out and suddenly forty men can look at the draw sheet on a Friday afternoon and see an actual path. Ask anyone who was in the building for a semi-final between two players nobody had tipped whether the tennis was worse. It was not. It was tighter, stranger and considerably more anxious, which is usually what makes a match memorable.

Look at what happens at this tournament when the favourites are missing, and you will find that the answer is usually something wonderful. Absences here have a habit of turning into breakthroughs. Mboko was a wild card. Shelton had never won a Masters. The gap at the top of a draw is the space where a career starts.

Toronto, where the top of the game turns up

The women's draw does not have the same absentee problem. Aryna Sabalenka, the world number one, is the top seed in Toronto. Elena Rybakina is seeded second and Jessica Pegula third, and Pegula has won this title twice already — a player who has quietly built a Canadian record most bigger names would envy.

What makes the women's event compelling this year is the shape of the season behind it. The two Grand Slam titles on clay and grass both went to first-time major champions, which has left the ranking list in a state of genuine flux: the very best player in the world is clearly Sabalenka, and yet she is not the one who has been winning the trophies that matter most. A hard-court fortnight in Toronto, on the surface that suits her more than any other, is exactly where you would expect that to be corrected. Whether it is or not is the story of the fortnight.

For Canadian fans there is Leylah Fernandez, who lit up New York as a teenager and has spent the years since being the player everybody in this country wants to see get one more magic fortnight. Home crowds are a strange gift for a player. They lift you and they lean on you, and the ones who learn to enjoy the weight of it tend to have the best weeks of their lives.

What it is like to be there

If you ever get the chance to go, take it. The two grounds are not enormous by Grand Slam standards, and that is the point. You can stand two metres from a top-twenty player on an outside court in the first week. You can watch a practice session in the morning where the only sound is the ball and the shoes. Both venues sit away from the downtown core — York University in Toronto, Jarry Park in Montreal — which means the tournament takes over a neighbourhood rather than getting swallowed by a city centre.

August in eastern Canada is hot and heavy, the kind of humidity that makes the evening sessions the best ticket in the building. Bring water, bring a hat, and do not book anything for the hour after your match finishes, because you will end up wandering to a side court and staying there. If you are planning a trip around watching live tennis rather than playing it, our guide to the best cities for a tennis holiday covers where the good weeks are.

The country this tournament built, and that built it back

Canada has not had a home singles champion here often. Robert Bedard was the last Canadian man to win it, in 1958. Faye Urban won the women's title in 1969, and then nobody did until Bianca Andreescu in Toronto in 2019, in that unforgettable final where Serena Williams could not continue and Andreescu walked round the net to console her rather than celebrate. Fifty years between Canadian women champions, and then two in six years once Mboko took her turn.

That is not a coincidence. Tennis Canada has spent two decades building a development system centred on the national training base in Montreal, and the results arrived all at once: Auger-Aliassime, Denis Shapovalov, Fernandez, Andreescu, Mboko. A country that had spent a century as a polite host of other people's tennis suddenly had players in the second week of Slams. Watching those names on a Canadian court in August is watching a long-term plan pay out in public.

Where it leads

The National Bank Open is not an end point. It is the first big test of the North American hard-court run that finishes at Flushing Meadows. From here everybody moves on to Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati to the US Open, which is where the season decides who it has been about all along. The players who peak in Canada do not always survive the month. The ones who lose early here sometimes arrive in New York fresher than anybody.

So watch this fortnight for what it is: two tournaments pretending to be one, in two cities that spend the year waiting for their turn. The draws are made. The trophies have been polished in two buildings 500 kilometres apart. On 1 August the first balls go up in Toronto and Montreal at more or less the same moment, and for thirteen days a whole country gets to argue about which half got the better half.

Photo: Felix Auger-Aliassime at the DC Open by Hameltion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.