Montreal Without Its Biggest Names: Why Top Players Skipped a Masters 1000

You booked it back in March. Or maybe you booked nothing at all, and simply kept the second week of August clear the way you always do, because the North American hard-court swing is the stretch of the season that feels most like summer: night sessions, warm concrete, a stadium that stays loud past midnight. Either way, you had a picture in your head of what this fortnight would look like.

This year, in Montreal, that picture is missing three faces.

By the time the main draw opened at IGA Stadium on 2 August, the National Bank Open had lost the world number one, the most decorated man in the history of the sport, and the reigning US Open champion. Jannik Sinner is not here. Novak Djokovic is not here. Carlos Alcaraz is not here. A Masters 1000 event with 9.4 million dollars on the table and one of the great tennis crowds in the world is being played without the three men most of those people would have paid to watch.

A short flight away, in Toronto, something close to the opposite is happening. Every single one of the top eight women in the world unpacked her bags and got to work.

That contrast is the story of the summer, and it is far more interesting than a list of withdrawals.

The week the draw fell apart

The bad news arrived in stages, which is somehow worse than all at once.

Alcaraz was gone first, and for the most understandable reason: he has not played a match since April. Then, in the last week of July, Tennis Canada confirmed that both Sinner and Djokovic had pulled out. Sinner had defended his Wimbledon title only weeks earlier, beating Djokovic in the semi-finals on the way. Neither man was carrying an obvious, visible injury. Both cited the same thing.

"After carefully considering all the factors together with my team, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw from Montreal," Sinner said in the statement released through the tour. "It is never easy to miss such an important event, but we believe this is the right decision to prioritise my health."

You can read that two ways, and both are true. It is a player protecting a body that has to survive another three months. It is also a player quietly voting on the shape of the calendar with the only ballot he has.

Valerie Tetreault, the tournament director, responded with a grace that must have taken some effort. "We are obviously very disappointed that Jannik and Novak will not be joining us in Montreal this year, especially after they also withdrew from last year's tournament in Toronto," she said. "We respect their decisions and understand that, with such a demanding schedule, players' health must remain the priority."

Read that middle clause again, because it contains the whole argument: especially after they also withdrew from last year's tournament. This is not a freak week. It is the second year running that Canada has sold tickets to a tournament its biggest names decided to sit out.

The reaction outside the tournament office was less diplomatic. One widely followed tennis account called the situation an absolute disaster for Montreal. Jon Wertheim of Tennis Channel went further, describing the format experiment that many people believe is at the root of all this as a failure, and saying it was time to cut bait.

The wrist that changed a Spaniard's summer

Alcaraz belongs in a separate paragraph, because his absence is not a scheduling choice. It is an injury, and a specific, nasty one.

He hurt the wrist during his opening win at the Barcelona Open on 14 April. The diagnosis was an inflamed tendon sheath in his right wrist, which is the kind of phrase that sounds minor until you understand what it has done to other careers. Alcaraz and his team have been unusually cautious with it, and if you want to know why, the names are Juan Martin del Potro and Dominic Thiem: two players of enormous gift whose wrists took years away from them.

So he missed the clay. He missed the grass. He watched from the outside as his own defence of a Grand Slam title happened without him, a story we followed in detail when Alcaraz withdrew from Roland Garros as the defending champion. Montreal was supposed to be the tune-up, the gentle re-entry, the fortnight where he shook off four months of rust before New York.

The current word is better than it has been all year. He has been cleared to resume full on-court work, he has posted training footage at proper intensity, and he is on the entry list for the US Open, where he is the defending champion. The target now is Cincinnati. For a player who has spent a summer watching, that is a hard and brave date to circle.

Twelve days, and the argument sitting underneath them

Here is the part that will decide how the next few years of tennis feel, and it sounds administrative right up until it is not.

Seven of the nine Masters 1000 events on the 2026 calendar are now played over twelve days rather than one week. Canada and Cincinnati were among the most recent to be stretched. The logic from the tour side is sound on paper: more days means more sessions to sell, bigger aggregate crowds, richer broadcast windows, and, in theory, more rest between matches for the players themselves.

The logic from the player side is that a twelve-day Masters is not a longer tournament, it is a longer absence. If you go deep, you are locked into a city for a fortnight. Stack two of those back to back immediately before a Grand Slam and you have surrendered a month. Lose early and you are stranded in a hotel with nothing to do but wait. Win the thing and you arrive at the US Open already tired.

Both Sinner and Djokovic withdrew in the shadow of that format. Players have said openly that they preferred the one-week version and that nobody consulted them before it changed. Alexander Zverev and Alcaraz have both been vocal about how packed the schedule has become. The line that has followed the sport around since Alcaraz said it in September 2024 is still the bluntest summary anyone has managed: they are going to kill us in some way.

Jack Draper, whose rise through the men's game we covered earlier this season, has made the same case in calmer language, arguing that the tour and the calendar have to adapt if players want long careers rather than brilliant short ones. That is the crux of it. Nobody is claiming tennis is too hard. They are claiming that a season running from the first days of January to late November, across every continent and three surfaces, with mandatory events that carry penalties for skipping them, is a structure built for a sport that no longer exists.

Why this is really a fight about who owns the schedule

The withdrawals are the symptom. The argument underneath is about power, and it is currently sitting in a courtroom.

In March 2025 the Professional Tennis Players Association, the body Djokovic helped create, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the sport's governing organisations, describing the system as a cartel. Strip away the legal language and the complaint is one that any freelancer would recognise instantly. Players are classified as independent contractors, but they are controlled like employees: told which tournaments they must enter, how many weeks a year they must be available, what they may and may not sign, and where the ceiling on their earnings sits.

The case has already produced movement. Tennis Australia settled with the PTPA over the winter, and in January the Australian Open announced a sixteen per cent rise in prize money. Money and workload are the same argument wearing different clothes, which is why the sport keeps circling back to it, as it did during the Grand Slam prize money standoff earlier this year.

None of that helps a family who drove in from Ottawa with two kids and a hand-painted sign. But it explains why a world number one at the peak of his powers finds it reasonable to skip a mandatory Masters 1000 in the middle of his best season. He is not being difficult. He is doing the only kind of scheduling he actually controls, which is subtraction.

Meanwhile, in Toronto

Now look across to Sobeys Stadium, where the mood is entirely different.

The WTA 1000 got the lot. Aryna Sabalenka, the world number one, is the top seed. Behind her: Elena Rybakina, Jessica Pegula, Coco Gauff, Mirra Andreeva, Linda Noskova, Iga Swiatek and Amanda Anisimova. That is the entire top eight in one draw, in one city, in the first week of August. Naomi Osaka is in there too, in a section that could deliver a quarter-final against Rybakina, Gauff or Noskova.

Two of those names carry extra weight this season. Andreeva arrived in Canada as a first-time Grand Slam champion, having won Roland Garros at nineteen. Noskova is the reigning Wimbledon champion. The women's game has spent 2026 producing new major winners at a rate the men's game has not managed, and every one of them turned up in Ontario to test her form on a fast hard court.

The women's draw has its own losses, and one of them stings for the hosts. Victoria Mboko, the young Canadian who won this title on home soil last year when the women played Montreal, withdrew with a left knee injury. She was the emotional centre of the whole fortnight and she will not hit a ball. Karolina Muchova, a Wimbledon finalist this summer, is out after a small procedure. Jasmine Paolini, Dayana Yastremska and Emma Raducanu are also missing.

But nobody is calling the Toronto field depleted, because it is not. The difference is not that WTA players have easier lives or tougher bodies. It is that the two tours have arrived at this moment carrying different formats, different histories and different pressures, and this fortnight has laid the results side by side in a way that is impossible to look away from.

So who is actually playing in Montreal?

Quite a lot, as it happens, and this is where fans tend to sell an event short.

Alexander Zverev is the top seed, and he arrives as something he was not twelve months ago: a Grand Slam champion. He finally got there at Roland Garros, coming through a five-set final against Flavio Cobolli by 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 6-7(5), 6-1 to become the first German man to win a major since Boris Becker and the first ever to win in Paris. If you want the full story of that fortnight, including Andreeva's breakthrough on the same weekend, our Roland Garros recap has it. He is in the same quarter as Taylor Fritz, whom he beat in straight sets at Wimbledon last month to end a seven-match losing run against the American.

Felix Auger-Aliassime is the second seed, and this is the detail worth savouring if you are in the building. He is seeded second at a Masters 1000 for the first time in his career, and it has happened in his home city. Montreal has waited a long time to watch a local player walk out as one of the two men expected to win the thing, and that crowd does not need much encouragement at the best of times.

Ben Shelton is defending the title he won in Toronto last year, which is one of the pleasant absurdities of this two-city tournament: he defends in a different city from the one where he won it. He opened against fellow American Jenson Brooksby, and his section points toward a possible quarter-final with Daniil Medvedev, who lifted this trophy back in 2021.

An open Masters 1000 is not a lesser tournament. It is a different one. The rounds are longer, the upsets come earlier, and the final is genuinely unknowable. Some of the best afternoons of tennis you will ever watch happen in draws exactly like this one.

What this actually costs, and who pays it

Let us be honest about the ledger, because both sides of it are real.

The tournament pays. Tennis Canada sells a fortnight partly on the promise of star power, and when the top three men are absent two years running, that promise gets harder to make. Sponsors notice. Broadcasters notice. So do the families who budgeted for this back in the spring and cannot get those two days off work again.

The players pay too, in a currency that never shows up in a results table. A tour that runs eleven months forces a choice between being present and being intact. Watch enough careers and the shape repeats itself: the brilliant few seasons, the injury that never quite resolves, the slow fade. The physical toll of the modern game and how long recovery genuinely takes is something we have written about at length in our guide to tennis injuries and recovery, and the pattern is not subtle.

And you pay, because you are the one left to reconcile the two. You want the best players on court. You also do not want to watch them break. The sport has spent two years pretending those two wishes are compatible, and it is running out of room.

Watch it anyway

Here is what I would do with the next ten days, if it were my fortnight.

Watch Auger-Aliassime with the sound up. A home player carrying a home draw is one of the most charged things in tennis, and the pressure doubles now that he is expected to win rather than merely hoped to.

Watch the Toronto draw greedily, because a field containing the entire top eight will produce at least one match people are still describing years from now. Sabalenka in full flight on a quick hard court is a spectacle. Andreeva against any of the bigger hitters is a chess problem played at ninety miles an hour.

And keep an eye on the qualifiers and wild cards in Montreal, because this is exactly the kind of draw where somebody arrives. A twenty-year-old who would normally run into a top-three player in the third round now meets somebody beatable, wins, believes it, and walks out of Canada a different competitor. That happens in these fortnights far more often than the schedule-doom conversation admits.

The withdrawals in Montreal are not a scandal and they are not a shrug. They are a bill arriving. Tennis expanded its biggest events, kept its longest season, made attendance compulsory, and then seemed surprised when the people whose bodies pay for all of it began declining the invitation. Toronto shows the sport what a full field still looks like. Montreal shows what happens when the arithmetic finally stops working. Which of those two pictures the people running the game choose to take seriously will shape every summer you spend watching from now on.

Photo: Spectators at the US Open by Steven Pisano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.