Sloane Stephens Is Back in the US Open Draw, and She Has Done This Before

In July 2017 Sloane Stephens was the 957th best tennis player in the world, which is a number so far outside the professional game that it is essentially a rounding error. Nine weeks later she was the US Open champion. That is not a comeback story that was polished up afterwards for a documentary. That is what actually happened, in public, on television, in front of a Flushing Meadows crowd that could not quite believe what it was being shown.

On 18 August this year the USTA published its list of main-draw wild cards for the 2026 US Open, and her name was on it again. Sloane Stephens, 33 years old, back from another injury that swallowed another year of her career, handed a place in the biggest tournament in American tennis. If you only follow the sport loosely, that might read like a nice gesture towards a former champion. It is not. She has spent the whole of 2026 earning it the hard way, and if you know what she did the last time she arrived in New York in this condition, you will want to know where she is playing.

The list, and who was on it

The wild cards came out ten days before the tournament, which begins on 30 August at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and runs to 13 September. Eight singles places in each draw sit outside the ranking system, in the gift of the host federation, and the USTA used two of the women's spots on former champions: Venus Williams, who won the title in 2000 and 2001, and Sloane Stephens, who won it in 2017.

The rest of the women's list went to Americans Carol Young Suh Lee, Reese Brantmeier and the 17-year-old Thea Frodin, plus Leolia Jeanjean of France and Taylah Preston of Australia. One women's spot was deliberately left empty, held open while Serena Williams decided what she wanted her season to look like. On the men's side the headline name was Gael Monfils, who turns 40 in September and is retiring at the end of the year, alongside Alexei Popyrin and a clutch of young Americans.

It is a list with a theme, and the theme is time. Two champions from the 2000s and 2010s, a showman playing his last summer, and a 17-year-old who was not born when Venus won her second title here. New York has always leaned into that. It is the Slam most comfortable with sentiment, the one that will put a 46-year-old on a night session and let 23,000 people lose their minds about it.

But sentiment is not the same as charity, and Stephens is not on this list because someone felt sorry for her.

What actually happened in 2017

To understand why her name matters, you have to sit with the 2017 numbers for a moment, because they still do not look real.

She had surgery on her left foot in January 2017 for a stress fracture. She was out for 11 months. When she came back at Wimbledon that summer, having not played a competitive match in almost a year, her ranking had collapsed to 957. Not 95. Not 195. Nine hundred and fifty-seven.

She played Toronto. She played Cincinnati. She went deep in both, which lifted her ranking to 83, and she arrived at the US Open unseeded, which meant the draw could hand her anybody at any time and frequently did. Sixty-nine days after her first match back, she beat Venus Williams 6-1, 0-6, 7-5 in a semi-final that swung wildly enough to make the whole stadium feel unwell, and then she beat her friend Madison Keys 6-3, 6-0 in the final. Sixty-one minutes. Two of the most nervous hours anyone has spent watching an American final turned into an hour of the cleanest hitting of Stephens's life.

She became the fifth unseeded woman of the Open era to win a Grand Slam singles title, and the lowest ranked player ever to win the US Open. She had spent most of that year in a medical boot, unable to enter tournaments at all, and she left New York with a cheque for 3.7 million dollars. Her reaction to being handed it, which is worth looking up, was mostly disbelief. If you have ever wondered how the money in professional tennis actually distributes itself, that fortnight is the extreme version of the answer: nothing at all for most of the year, and then a life-changing sum in one building over two weeks.

That is the run she is walking back into this week. Everyone at Flushing Meadows knows it. She knows it.

The foot, again

The reason 2026 is not simply a nostalgia lap is that the past two years took almost everything from her again, and in almost exactly the same way.

In 2025 she suffered a stress fracture in her right foot. The mirror image of the injury that cost her 2017. She played five matches all season. She did not compete at all between late February and mid-September, which is the entire clay season, the entire grass season, and most of the American hard-court summer.

Here is the part that tells you who she is. Her left foot had been operated on. When the right one went, she was told what another surgery at her age would probably mean, and she has since described it plainly: another operation could have ended her career. So she did not have one. She took the slow route instead, rehabilitation rather than the knife, months of doing very little in a sport where doing very little is how rankings die.

Rankings are a rolling 52-week ledger. Miss a year and it does not just pause, it empties. Stephens began 2026 ranked 1,098 in the world. Lower than the number that made her famous in 2017. A former world No. 3, a Grand Slam champion, a Roland Garros finalist, outside the top thousand players on the planet.

Climbing back through the side door

What she has done since January is the least glamorous and most impressive part of the whole story, and almost nobody outside the sport noticed it happening.

When your ranking is 1,098, you cannot enter Grand Slams. You cannot enter most tour events. You go to qualifying, which is three extra matches played in the week before the tournament on outside courts in front of a few hundred people, mostly against hungry players ten years younger than you who would like nothing more than to knock over a former champion. Lose one and you fly home with nothing.

Stephens went to Australian Open qualifying in January and won three matches to make the main draw, her first tour-level wins since 2024. She lost in the first round to Karolina Pliskova, and said afterwards that the week had still been a success, which it plainly was. Then she went and did it again at Roland Garros, qualifying for a second Grand Slam in the same season, the year after she barely played at all.

Through the summer the results started to stack: a second round in Memphis, a second round in Toronto, and then Cincinnati, where she beat Anastasia Potapova to reach the third round. That was her first win over a top-30 player since Madrid in 2024. Marta Kostyuk stopped her in the next round, but by the time the wild-card list was published she had hauled her ranking from 1,098 to around 240 in eight months.

That is not a gift. That is roughly 30 matches of grinding, most of them in places the television cameras do not go.

The sentence that explains her whole year

After winning her opening match in Cincinnati, Stephens said something that deserves to be pinned above the desk of anyone who has ever tried to get good at something again after a long time away.

"It doesn't look amazing all of the time and it doesn't look like my best form that I've ever had," she said, "but I think that's what makes it kind of cool is that I'm not winning at the best form and looking amazing, but I'm finding a way."

There is a particular strain of sports writing that insists comebacks are about belief and hunger and refusing to listen to the doubters. This is better than that, because it is honest. She is not pretending the tennis is what it was in 2018. She is telling you the tennis is patchy, the body is different, the timing comes and goes, and she is winning some matches anyway. Finding a way is not a slogan when you are 33 and your foot has broken twice.

If you watch her in New York, that is the thing to watch for. Not whether she looks like the 2017 version. Whether she finds a way.

What a wild card actually is

For anyone who watches tennis without playing it, the wild card is one of the quiet oddities of the sport, so it is worth explaining properly.

Almost every place in a Grand Slam draw is allocated by cold arithmetic. The top 104 or so players by ranking get in directly. Sixteen more come through qualifying. That leaves eight seats per draw that the tournament simply gives to whoever it likes, and this year those seats are worth more than they have ever been worth anywhere in the sport. The 2026 US Open is paying out 108 million dollars, the first Grand Slam to cross nine figures, and the cheque for losing in the first round is 140,000 dollars, up 27 per cent on last year. The champion gets 5.5 million.

Read those two numbers next to each other and the wild card stops being a ceremonial gift. For a player ranked 240, whose year so far has been qualifying draws and outside courts, one free place in a first round is worth more than an entire good season on the tier below. It is the difference between a profitable year and a ruinous one, decided by a committee in a room.

Tournaments use them for three reasons. To develop their own young players, which is why Thea Frodin and Michael Zheng are on the list. To reward loyalty and history, which is why Monfils gets to say goodbye to New York properly. And to fill the stadium, which is the honest explanation for the Williams sisters and, partly, for Stephens.

The interesting thing about the Stephens wild card is that it sits in all three categories at once. She is an American who has given the USTA a champion. She sells tickets. And on current form she has a genuine chance of winning matches, which is not always true of the sentimental picks. A player ranked 240 who has just beaten a top-30 opponent is roughly the standard of a solid main-draw entrant. She has not been handed something she cannot use.

The rest of the fortnight around her

She arrives into a tournament with a strange shape this year. Jannik Sinner, the world No. 1, withdrew on 21 August with a right knee injury, his first missed Grand Slam since 2019, and is aiming to return for the Asian swing in October. Carlos Alcaraz is defending his title on almost no match practice after a long layoff of his own. Venus Williams is in the singles draw at 46, and she and Serena have a wild card into the women's doubles, which begins on 3 September.

That is a tournament with more question marks than usual, and question marks favour the sort of player who does not care what the seedings say. Stephens has spent her whole career being unpredictable in exactly that fashion: a semi-finalist at the 2013 Australian Open at 19, having beaten Serena Williams on the way; a champion here in 2017 when nobody had her in the field; a Roland Garros finalist and world No. 3 in 2018; a Miami champion the same spring. She has also had long flat stretches where nothing worked. Both things are true, and the second one is why the first still surprises people.

If you want the full picture of the tournament she is walking into, from the roof over Arthur Ashe to the way the night sessions work, the complete US Open guide covers it, and if you enjoy the historical end of things, the all-time list of US Open champions is where her 2017 name sits alongside the Williams sisters, Chris Evert and Serena's six.

How to watch her, if you want to

The draw is made in the days before play begins, so nobody knows yet who she gets. What is worth knowing in advance is this.

She will almost certainly not be on Arthur Ashe for a first round. Wild cards ranked outside the top 200 tend to land on Court 5 or Court 11 or Louis Armstrong at an awkward hour, and honestly that is the better watch anyway: you can hear the ball, you can hear the coaching box, and you can see a player's face when a point goes wrong. A first-round match on an outside court at the US Open is the single most underrated ticket in tennis.

Watch her forehand, which is one of the sweetest strokes in the women's game when she is moving well and the first thing to go when she is not. Watch her movement in the first three or four games, because the foot is the whole story and you will know within ten minutes whether she is trusting it. And watch the crowd, who will be entirely on her side and will make more noise than the court capacity should permit.

The thing about doing it twice

Comeback stories usually come with a tidy shape, which is why they are so satisfying and so often slightly false. The player falls, the player suffers, the player rises, credits roll. What Stephens has now is messier and considerably more interesting. She has done the whole arc once already, to a degree that made her briefly the most talked-about athlete in America, and then life kept going for another nine years and broke her other foot.

She is not chasing the 2017 story. You cannot chase that; it was lightning, and everyone involved knew it at the time. What she is doing is something a lot of people watching at home will recognise better than they recognise a Grand Slam title: being decent at something she used to be brilliant at, and turning up anyway, and finding that the good days still arrive often enough to be worth the bad ones.

On 30 August she walks back into a stadium complex where she once played the best fortnight of her life. She will probably not win it. She might not win a match. But there are perhaps two dozen people alive who know what it feels like to hold that trophy, and she is one of them, and she got there from 957 in the world. Whatever the draw does to her this year, she has already made the interesting version of the argument: that the way back is available, that it is horrible, and that some people take it twice.

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Related reading on super.tennis: the complete US Open guide, Venus Williams, the most US Open titles in history, and how much tennis players actually earn.