Four Seeds, One Night: The US Open Semifinal That Has Not Happened Since 1975

Look at the four names left in the women's draw at the US Open tonight and something will feel slightly off, the way a room feels when someone has quietly straightened every picture on the wall. Aryna Sabalenka. Jessica Pegula. Elena Rybakina. Coco Gauff. One, three, two, four. The top four seeds in the tournament, all of them still here on the second Thursday, all of them playing on Arthur Ashe Stadium tonight for two places in Saturday's final.

That is not how this is supposed to go. Not in 2026, not in women's tennis, not at a tournament that has spent the last decade specialising in beautiful chaos. And it has not gone this way at the US Open since 1975, which is to say since before the tournament moved to its current home, before the stadium these four are about to walk into existed, before three of the four semifinalists' parents were old enough to buy a ticket.

Fifty-one years. That is the number under tonight. Here is what it means, who these four women are, and why the next two nights in New York are worth clearing your evening for even if you have never held a racket in your life.

The stat, and why it is genuinely strange

Seeding is a promise the sport makes and almost never keeps. The idea is simple enough: the organisers rank the best players, spread them across the draw so they cannot meet early, and if form holds you get the best possible semifinals. Everybody nods along. Then the draw starts and a 19-year-old you have never heard of takes out the third seed in two sets on a side court at eleven in the morning and the whole tidy structure collapses.

That collapse is usually the fun part. It is why we wrote before this fortnight began that nobody had any idea who was going to win this thing, and it is why women's tennis has been the most reliably thrilling product in the sport for years. The last few seasons have handed the biggest trophies to players ranked outside the top ten, to first-time major winners, to teenagers who had never been past the fourth round. Only two months ago the Wimbledon title went to Linda Noskova, whose breakthrough summer had already been one of the stories of the year before she got her hands on a Venus Rosewater Dish.

So for all four top seeds to survive seven rounds between them without a single upset is not a boring outcome. It is a freak one. In the modern game, with the depth on tour and the physical demands of a two-week hard court major in New York heat, getting the four best players in the world into the same Thursday is roughly as likely as four different weather forecasts agreeing on a Tuesday.

The last time it happened at Flushing Meadows, the tournament was not even at Flushing Meadows. In 1975 the US Open was played at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills, a mile or so from where tonight's matches will be staged, and that was the first year the event was held on clay rather than grass. The four semifinalists were Chris Evert seeded one, Virginia Wade seeded two, Martina Navratilova seeded three and Evonne Goolagong Cawley seeded four. Evert beat Goolagong Cawley in the final, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2, for the first of what would become four consecutive US Open titles. Navratilova was 18 and had defected from Czechoslovakia weeks earlier. Wade would wait two more years for her Wimbledon fairytale.

That is the company tonight's four are keeping. Four names, all of whom ended up in the Hall of Fame, in a semifinal line-up nobody has managed to replicate for half a century.

The chaos was there. It just happened underneath them

This is the part that gets missed when a statistic like tonight's goes round the internet. The seeds holding at the top does not mean the fortnight was quiet. It means the wreckage happened one floor down.

Iga Swiatek, a player who has spent most of the last five years winning majors, went out in the fourth round to Zheng Qinwen, who came from a set down to do it. Naomi Osaka, a two-time champion here and one of the biggest draws in the sport, ran into Rybakina and got the full flat-hitting treatment. Noskova arrived as the reigning Wimbledon champion and took Sabalenka to a deciding tie-break before losing a match she will think about for months. Mirra Andreeva, 19 years old and seeded fifth, held two match points against Gauff and could not convert either.

Any of those four results tipping the other way and we are not writing this piece. That is the thin margin the stat sits on, and it is worth holding on to while you watch tonight, because it tells you something true about the level: the four women left are not here because the draw was kind. They are here because in a fortnight full of players capable of beating anybody, they were the ones who kept finding a way out. The bracket looks tidy. Getting through it was not.

Aryna Sabalenka is going for something only two women have done

Start with the champion, because she is the reason the top of this draw has felt so immovable. Sabalenka has won this title the last two years running. She is 28. She has spent 99 consecutive weeks as the world number one, a run that is about to end for reasons that have nothing to do with her form and which we will get to shortly. And if she wins two more matches she becomes only the third woman in the Open era to win three straight US Open singles titles.

The other two are Chris Evert, who won four in a row from 1975 to 1978, and Serena Williams, who won three in a row from 2012 to 2014. That is the entire list. There is no fourth name. Fifty-eight years of professional tennis at this tournament and two women have managed to be the best player in New York three Septembers running.

She got here the hard way on Wednesday. Her quarter-final against Noskova was the best women's match of the tournament so far, two and a bit hours of enormous ball-striking that came down to a first-set tie-break, a second set that got away from her, and a third set in which she was down 4-2 and looked, briefly, like a champion running out of road. She got it back. The match ended in a deciding tie-break, 10-7, and she finished it with an ace on a second serve, which is either magnificent or unhinged depending on your nerves.

Tonight she plays Jessica Pegula. She has beaten Pegula in the final here in 2024 and in the semifinals here last year. If you are counting, that means the two of them have now met at the business end of this tournament in three consecutive years, something only three other pairs of women have done in the Open era.

Jessica Pegula keeps arriving at the same door

Pegula is 32 and has been one of the best players in the world for the better part of five years without ever winning a major. She has now reached the US Open semifinals three years in a row, which sounds like a triumph until you look at what happened in each of the previous two and remember that the woman standing in her way both times is standing in her way again tonight.

Her quarter-final was an all-American afternoon against Emma Navarro, and it went the way Pegula's matches often go: she lost the first set 6-3, looked outplayed for 40 minutes, and then simply stopped missing. 3-6, 6-4, 6-3. There is no single shot in her game that will make a highlight reel by itself. What she has instead is the ability to take an opponent's best pattern and give it back slightly better, over and over, until the other player runs out of ideas. It is a deeply unglamorous superpower and it has taken her to the top four in the world.

Home crowd, third semifinal in three years, a 2024 final that she lost in straight sets and has clearly not forgotten. There is a version of tonight where the whole Sabalenka story stops right here.

Elena Rybakina has already won something before she hits a ball

Here is the quirk that makes tonight so unusual. One of the four semifinalists has already had her biggest news of the week confirmed. When Rybakina came back to beat Zheng Qinwen 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 on Wednesday in two hours and 14 minutes, she did more than reach her first US Open semifinal. She guaranteed that she will be the world number one when the rankings are published on Monday, ending Sabalenka's 99-week reign, whatever happens over the next three days.

Rybakina has been the most under-discussed great player of her generation, which is why we called her the quietest superstar in the sport back in the summer. She won Wimbledon in 2022 at 23 and the coverage largely moved on within a week. She won the WTA Finals last year and the Australian Open in January, back-to-back big-title weeks that only one player in the previous eight years had managed. And through all of that she has played with the same flat expression, the same enormous unhurried serve, the same refusal to give a crowd anything to grab hold of.

Zheng, for the record, had earned that quarter-final the hard way, coming from a set down to knock out Iga Swiatek in the fourth round. Rybakina beat her anyway, from a set down herself, on the biggest court in the sport.

Now she plays Gauff for a place in her first US Open final. The number one ranking is hers on Monday. She would quite obviously prefer to arrive at it holding a trophy.

Coco Gauff was two points from being on a plane

And then there is the one who very nearly was not here at all. Gauff, the 2023 champion, playing in front of a New York crowd that adopted her when she was 15, lost the first set of her quarter-final against Mirra Andreeva 6-2 and then went down two match points in a second-set tie-break. Two points from a straight-sets exit in front of 23,000 people who have watched her grow up.

She saved both. She won the tie-break 9-7. She won the third set 6-2, and by the end of it Andreeva, one of the most gifted 19-year-olds in the world, was the one who looked young.

That is the second great skill in tennis, after hitting the ball well: the ability to be losing badly and still be entirely present. Gauff has had it since she was a teenager, and it is the reason she now has two majors at 22 while people are still describing her game as a work in progress. It is also the reason nobody in the locker room enjoys being ahead of her.

Four players, four completely different things at stake

What makes tonight rare is not just the seeding. It is that the four stories do not overlap at all.

Sabalenka is chasing history that only Evert and Serena have. Pegula is chasing the first major of a career that is running out of prime years. Rybakina, who has already secured the ranking, is chasing the one big American trophy her cabinet does not have. Gauff is chasing a second US Open title on the court where she became famous.

Nobody is playing for the same prize, which is why nobody is going to hold anything back.

How to watch tonight if you do not play

You do not need to understand a kick serve to enjoy this. A few things to watch for that will make the evening richer:

In Sabalenka against Pegula, watch the first four shots of each point. Sabalenka wants the rally over inside four shots. Pegula wants it to last twelve. Whichever pattern is winning by the middle of the second set is almost certainly the pattern that decides the match, and you can track it without knowing a single technical term.

In Rybakina against Gauff, watch the second serve. Rybakina has one of the great first serves in the women's game, but the second serve is where the pressure lands, and Gauff is one of the best returners alive at stepping in and taking that ball early. Every second serve is a small argument between two enormous strengths.

Watch the body language at changeovers. Not for drama, but because at this stage of a major, the towel and the chair are where matches quietly turn. Pegula in particular gives almost nothing away, which is itself information.

And if you can, watch late. The Ashe night session under the closed roof or the New York sky is a genuinely different sporting experience from the same match in daylight, something we have written about at length and with affection. The noise gets trapped. The court looks like a stage. Nothing in tennis sounds like 23,000 people realising at the same moment that a match has turned.

What happens next

The winners meet on Saturday for the title. Whoever it is, the story lines up almost too neatly: a Sabalenka victory makes her the third woman in the Open era to win three straight here, a Pegula victory ends the longest wait in the top ten, a Rybakina victory pairs the number one ranking with the trophy in the same week, and a Gauff victory gives her a second title on the court that made her.

The men have their own version of this on Friday, with an all-American semifinal between Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe guaranteeing a home player in Sunday's final, and Alexander Zverev meeting the unseeded Karen Khachanov in the other half. That draw broke the ordinary way, full of upsets and surprises. The women's draw did not break at all, and that is precisely what makes it worth your attention.

Tennis usually asks you to fall in love with the underdog, and it is very good at producing them. Once in a long while it does the opposite. It sends the four best players in the world to the same building on the same night, refuses to let anyone hide behind a bad draw, and asks a simple question that the sport almost never gets to ask cleanly: on the biggest court there is, in the last week of the season's last major, who is actually the best?

We get the answer over two nights. Forty-eight hours from now the argument will be settled, and it will be the first time in 51 years that nobody can say the draw did it for them.

Photo: a deep blue hard court with white lines, via Unsplash.