The Million Dollar Two Day Circus: US Open Mixed Doubles Returns

The best two days of this year's US Open will be finished before the US Open officially begins.

That sentence should not make sense. Grand Slams are two-week cathedrals; the good stuff is meant to arrive slowly, on the second Saturday, after you have earned it by watching a fortnight of tennis in a darkened living room. And yet on 25 and 26 August, five days before a single main-draw ball is struck in Queens, Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium will host the loudest, silliest, most star-stuffed thing on the tennis calendar: the US Open Mixed Doubles Championship, sixteen teams, one million dollars to the winners, and a guest list that reads like somebody raided the top ten and let them pick partners in a school playground.

Aryna Sabalenka has picked Novak Djokovic. Venus Williams, who turned 46 in June, has picked Alexander Bublik, the most unpredictable man in tennis. Naomi Osaka has picked Kei Nishikori. Alexandra Eala, three weeks after winning her first tour title, has picked Felix Auger-Aliassime and will play her first professional mixed doubles match on the biggest court in the sport.

If you love tennis but have never held a racket in anger, this is the event built for you. Here is what it is, why it exists, why it made half the locker room furious, and why the two players who hated it most have now won it twice.

A Slam that starts before it starts

The 2026 US Open main draw runs from 30 August to 13 September. But the gates at Flushing Meadows open a week earlier for Fan Week, which begins on 23 August: free access to the grounds, practice courts you can stand two metres from, qualifying matches where somebody ranked 180 in the world plays for the biggest payday of their life.

Fan Week used to be a pleasant warm-up act. Since 2025 it has had a headline event. The mixed doubles championship, once a genteel sideshow spread thinly across the second week in front of half-empty side courts, was ripped out of the main draw entirely and rebuilt as a two-day made-for-television spectacle in the week before. Eight qualifying teams play off on 24 August. Sixteen teams contest the championship proper on 25 and 26 August. The winners split one million dollars, which is more than either of them would earn for reaching the singles quarter-finals.

The tennis itself is deliberately compressed. Early-round matches are played in sets to four games rather than six, so a whole match can be done inside an hour. A match tiebreak replaces a deciding set. Nothing is allowed to drift. The idea is that you can sit down at seven in the evening, watch three matches involving eight famous people, and be finished before the subway gets awkward.

For a tournament that has spent decades trying to persuade casual viewers that doubles is worth their attention, it is the most aggressive answer anyone has tried: stop asking people to find doubles, and put doubles in the only place nobody can miss.

The field is faintly ridiculous, which is the whole idea

Look at the entry list and you can feel the USTA grinning.

Sabalenka and Djokovic is the headline, and it is a genuinely strange pairing to imagine: the most physically forceful ball-striker in the women's game alongside the most complete defensive mind the men's game has produced, a 24-time Grand Slam champion who has, at this stage of his career, very little left to prove and apparently a considerable amount left to enjoy. Sabalenka arrives in New York as the two-time defending US Open singles champion and the world No. 1. She could reasonably have spent that Tuesday resting. She has chosen instead to play an exhibition-adjacent event on a Tuesday night in front of 23,000 people, which tells you something about both her personality and the pull of the format.

Venus Williams with Bublik is the pairing that will sell out Armstrong. Venus has two mixed doubles majors already, won in a different century, and has spent 2026 doing the thing nobody expected her to still be doing: turning up. Bublik is the sport's designated chaos agent, a man who hits underarm serves for fun and has been known to describe his own tactics with open bafflement. Whatever happens on that court will not be boring.

Then there is the rest of it. Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud return as the 2025 runners-up, an unusually well-mannered team who came within two points of the title. Osaka and Nishikori give the event its Japanese superteam. Eala and Auger-Aliassime give it a genuine story: the 21-year-old from the Philippines who beat Jessica Pegula in the Washington final at the start of this month, walking out at Ashe with one of the most naturally gifted ball-strikers of his generation. If you have followed Eala's rise this season, the sheer speed of it is still difficult to process.

And at the centre of all of it, unfashionable and unbothered, stand the two-time defending champions.

The pseudo-exhibition, and the people who called it that

When the new format was announced in February 2025, the reaction from the doubles community was not polite.

Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, the Italian pair who had won the US Open mixed title in 2024 under the old rules, issued a joint statement describing the change as a "pseudo-exhibition" and a "profound injustice" that "disrespects an entire category of players". They were not being precious. The maths was brutal and simple: the old event had 32 teams, most of them doubles specialists, spread across the second week. The new one had 16 teams, selected largely on singles ranking, which meant that the people who had spent their careers becoming the best mixed doubles players in the world were now, in effect, uninvited from the only mixed doubles title that pays properly.

Doubles is where a lot of professional tennis careers actually survive. It is where players go after injuries, after the singles ranking slides, after the body stops producing three-set wins on demand. A doubles specialist is not a failed singles player; they are a different kind of expert, with a different set of instincts about angles, poaching and the half-volley. Watching a genuine doubles team work is closer to watching a well-drilled midfield than watching two individuals share a court. If you have never really looked at it that way, the basics of doubles patterns reward about ten minutes of attention and change what you see forever.

Handing their showpiece to sixteen singles stars for a two-day television event was, from that perspective, a raid. The BBC ran the "profound injustice" line as a headline. The argument was not really about scheduling. It was about whether the sport regards doubles as a discipline or as content.

The other three Slams are watching very carefully

It is easy to forget how much history is being reorganised here. Mixed doubles is one of the oldest competitions in the sport. It survived the amateur era, the arrival of the Open era, the professionalisation of everything, and decades of being scheduled at times that suggested nobody in the building particularly wanted it there. For most of that time it was the format where a great champion could win an extra trophy almost by accident, and where fans got to see combinations that the rest of the season would never allow.

Australia, Paris and Wimbledon still run theirs the traditional way: a full draw, mostly specialists and enthusiastic singles players, matches played over the fortnight on outside courts, a trophy handed over on the second weekend to modest applause. New York is now the outlier, and everybody else is watching the numbers.

If two nights in August generate more attention, more ticket revenue and more social clips than a fortnight of conventional mixed doubles ever did, the pressure on the other three to follow will be enormous. That is what makes this more than a scheduling curiosity. The US Open has effectively run a public experiment on whether a Grand Slam event can be redesigned around what an audience will actually watch, rather than around what the sport has always done. The result of that experiment is being read very closely in three other cities.

Then the Italians went and won it anyway

Here is where the story stops being a grievance and starts being wonderful.

Errani and Vavassori entered the 2025 event they had publicly condemned. They then walked through a draw stuffed with singles royalty and beat Swiatek and Ruud in the final, 6-3, 5-7, 10-6, taking the championship match into a deciding tiebreak in front of a full Ashe. Two doubles specialists, playing the format they had called an insult, defeating a two-time major champion and a three-time Grand Slam finalist to keep the trophy in Italian hands for a second year.

It was one of the most satisfying sporting outcomes of 2025, and it quietly proved both sides of the argument at once. The USTA got its stadium full and its highlights everywhere. Errani and Vavassori got the loudest crowd of their professional lives and a chance to demonstrate, in front of people who had never watched a doubles match on purpose, exactly what the specialists do that the singles stars cannot.

Because that is what the match showed. Under pressure, in the compressed format, the difference was not power. Swiatek and Ruud hit the ball harder. The Italians simply knew where everybody was going to be. Vavassori at the net has the reflexes of a goalkeeper and the positioning of somebody reading a script; Errani, who is 39 this year and about a foot shorter than most of the field, returns serve as though the ball owes her money. Even players who spend their lives in doubles admitted afterwards that the event had given them a level of attention they had never experienced.

What it feels like to watch

If you tune in for the first time this year, expect something that does not behave like tennis usually behaves.

The short sets mean there is no settling-in period. A break of serve in the first game is close to decisive, so everybody plays their most aggressive tennis immediately. Points are shorter, net exchanges are constant, and the reflex volleys come in bursts that make the crowd noise arrive a half-second late. Because the players know each other socially rather than professionally, there is a looseness to it: talking between points, laughing at their own mistakes, occasionally forgetting whose serve it is.

And there is the strangeness of seeing giants of the sport in an unfamiliar frame. Singles is a lonely, controlled thing; you watch a player manage themselves for two hours. Mixed doubles puts them in a partnership and shows you a completely different personality. You learn who apologises, who takes over, who covers for a partner having a bad five minutes. A great deal of what is charming about the format has nothing to do with the tennis at all.

There is also a tactical puzzle running underneath the fun, and once you notice it you cannot stop watching for it. Mixed doubles is the only format in tennis where the two players on the same side of the net have genuinely different physical tools, and every team has to decide how honest it is going to be about that. Do you aim relentlessly at the woman, on the assumption that the man hits harder, and risk looking both ungallant and foolish when she starts punishing you? Do you serve wide to open the court for your partner at the net, or straight at the body to jam the return and buy them an easy volley? Where does the returner stand when a man serving at 210 kilometres per hour is aiming at a target two metres away?

The good teams answer those questions before the match starts. The famous ones frequently work it out live, on camera, in front of a stadium. Watch how quickly Sabalenka takes charge of a point, or how Bublik handles the moment he realises his partner has seen more Grand Slam finals than he has. Those small negotiations are where the entertainment actually lives, and they are visible in a way that almost nothing in singles ever is.

Two things are worth knowing before you sit down. The first is that the final is played over full sets, so if the event is going to produce a real contest, it will produce it at the end. The second is that the crowd on those two nights is the least reverent crowd of the fortnight. Nobody has paid main-draw prices. Nobody is watching in respectful silence. If you want to know what New York sounds like when it has decided to enjoy itself, this is the sample.

The argument has not gone away

None of this settles the underlying question, and it is worth being honest about that rather than pretending the trophy fixed it.

Mixed doubles at the US Open is now, functionally, a different event with the same name. It has a million-dollar prize, a prime-time slot and a field selected to sell tickets. The doubles specialists who built the event's history mostly get in through the qualifying playoff or a wild card, and the tournament has already had some uncomfortable decisions to make about who deserves those places. The record books will continue to list mixed doubles champions in a single unbroken column, as though 2024 and 2026 were the same competition. They are not.

Whether that matters depends on what you think a Grand Slam is for. If it is a museum, the change is vandalism. If it is a sport that has to keep finding new people to fall in love with it, then two nights of Sabalenka and Djokovic sharing a service box is worth more than a fortnight of empty side courts, and the Italians proved that the specialists can win it on merit anyway.

What is not in doubt is that people are watching. That was the whole gamble, and it paid.

Where it fits in your week

The practical version, if you want to plan around it: Fan Week opens on 23 August, mixed doubles qualifying is on 24 August, and the championship runs across 25 and 26 August at Ashe and Armstrong. Then the grounds reset, the main draw begins on 30 August, and the singles fortnight runs to the men's final on 13 September. If you are working out what to watch and when across the whole two weeks, our US Open guide lays out the shape of it.

It is also, quietly, becoming the part of the calendar where the sport's great returning figures show up. Venus Williams is in this field at 46. Her sister has spent this summer easing back into competition through doubles as well, a route that lets a legendary body compete without asking it to survive three sets alone; the story of Serena's 2026 comeback has followed exactly that logic. Doubles has always been tennis's kindest format to the people it has already taken a great deal from.

So on the evening of 25 August, when Djokovic walks out to serve with Sabalenka standing at the net in front of him and 23,000 people making an unreasonable amount of noise about it, you will be watching something that did not exist three years ago, that a lot of serious people believe should not exist at all, and that two Italians keep winning out of what looks a great deal like spite.

Pull up a chair early. This one is over by Wednesday night.

Photo: Aryna Sabalenka at the DC Open, via Wikimedia Commons.