A little more than twelve hours after their gripping Canadian Open final in Montreal, Naomi Osaka joined Victoria Mboko in withdrawing from the Cincinnati Open, the main tuneup for the United States Open.
Mboko, the 18-year-old Canadian whose stunning run to her first WTA Tour title captivated the tournament and the sport the past week, said just after lifting the trophy that she wouldn’t be playing. She suffered a wrist injury during a fall in her semifinal win over Elena Rybakina, and played the final with strapping and a brace around her wrist.
“I’m not planning on playing Cincinnati at the moment. I just want to take care of my wrist a little bit right now, and I think it’s just very close and sudden for me to go there and play again I think in, like, two days,” she said in her news conference.
Osaka played seven matches at the tournament, including what was an emotionally charged final against a teenager playing her home WTA 1,000 tournament, the level just below a Grand Slam. She hadn’t done that since 2022, when she lost the Miami Open final to Iga Świątek.
She is also hoping for a wild card into the U.S. Open mixed doubles, which begins August 19. The singles begins August 24. Osaka plans to rest and reboot for a tournament which has won twice, most recently in 2020.
Their withdrawals, and the decision by several of the top men and women to skip the Canadian Open and play only in Cincinnati, come in the context of the two events expanding to 12 days, rather than one week.
That meant that the last rounds of the events in Toronto, for the men, and Montreal, for the women, took place after the qualifying and opening rounds started in Mason, Ohio. The Cincinnati Open singles final will also take place Monday August 18, with the U.S. Open mixed doubles scheduled to start the morning of August 19.
Osaka and Mboko’s withdrawals also rejig what was already a complicated draw. They were in line to receive performance byes, which allow players to go straight into the second round of the next tournament if they reach a certain stage of the tournament the immediate week prior. Osaka was due to play No. 20 seed Linda Nosková of the Czech Republic, while Mboko would have faced Diana Shnaider of Russia, the No. 14 seed.
Instead, four lucky losers will now play in two first-round matches to decide who will face those players. Iva Jović of the U.S. will play Solana Sierra of Argentina, while Spain’s Cristina Bucşa will play Yuan Yue of China.
(Photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)
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