The five qualifiers to follow at the US Open: from the teenager who beat his retiring hero to a 16-year-old prodigy against an Olympic champion in round one

Just after four on Thursday afternoon at Flushing Meadows, a nineteen-year-old from Nagoya walked to the net to shake hands with a thirty-six-year-old from Matsue and told him he had grown up watching him. The nineteen-year-old, Rei Sakamoto, had just beaten the thirty-six-year-old, Kei Nishikori, 6-4 7-6(3) in the third and final round of US Open qualifying. The win sent Sakamoto into the main draw of a Grand Slam for the first time in his career. The loss sent Nishikori, the 2014 US Open finalist and the man who put Japanese tennis on the Grand Slam map, into what will now be recorded as the last US Open match of his life. Nishikori announced in May that he would retire at the end of the 2026 season. "I still wish I could continue my playing career," he said at the time. "Even so, I can proudly say that I gave it my all."

The moment happened on an outside court, in front of a few hundred people, on the last day of a qualifying week that James Hansen in The Athletic called the part of the tournament where "the emotions of tennis are at their height." The main draw begins on Sunday. By then most of the qualifying stories will have been quietly filed away under the general narrative of what Alcaraz and Djokovic are up to. They should not be. Five of the players who came through qualifying this week have backstories worth telling before they play, and results worth following after. Our All Court pro Farhad Roshanaie is at Flushing all fortnight with an accreditation and will be courtside for as many of these matches as we can get him to.

Sakamoto and the man he grew up watching

Sakamoto is six foot four, described as a "cool kid" by his coaching team, and won the Australian Open boys' singles title in January 2024 beating the Czech Jan Kumstát in a three-set final. His career-high ATP ranking, achieved this May, is one hundred and fifty-two. That is nowhere near enough to enter a Grand Slam main draw on merit; he had to play qualifying to be here. In March, at the Miami Open, he beat Aleksandar Kovacevic 6-4 3-6 7-6(7) for his maiden ATP Tour victory, converting his fifth match point after five previous tour-level defeats. The generational symmetry with Nishikori was already in the record. Thursday's qualifying final round put it on court.

Nishikori was granted the wildcard into qualifying by the USTA as a valedictory gesture. "I felt like my feet were heavy when I went to train," he had said in the interview announcing his retirement. He served for the match at 5-4 in the second set and could not close it out. The tiebreak went 7-3 to Sakamoto. The nineteen-year-old sank to the court, then walked to the net, then paid tribute to the older man courtside and in his press conference afterwards. "I grew up watching him," he said, more or less on repeat, as though checking whether the sentence, and the result, had actually happened.

Sakamoto plays the Australian Aleksandar Vukic on Court 7 on Sunday. Vukic, thirty, is a former world number forty-three, a heavy favourite by ranking, and steady enough that a distracted opponent tends to lose to him. Sakamoto has spent the last forty-eight hours being congratulated on the biggest win of his life. Avoiding being the distracted opponent is what Sakamoto will hopefully have been focussing on, rather than the thrill of having made the main draw.

Zheng and Liutova: the comeback and the debut, meeting on day one

The gold medal from Paris was still warm on the ribbon when Qinwen Zheng finished 2024 as the world number four. She had reached the Australian Open final in January that year, won the Olympic gold-medal match against Donna Vékic in August, and lost the WTA Finals final in November against Coco Gauff in a third-set tiebreak. Not bad at all. The next thing that happened was surgery. Her right elbow, giving out for months, was operated on arthroscopically in July 2025. "I never thought the injury would last this long," she said later, once she had returned. Comebacks turned back into layoffs. A skipped Australian Open. A 12-13 record on tour in 2026. A ranking that has fallen from four to one hundred and twenty-one. She had not played a Grand Slam qualifying event since Melbourne in January 2022, when she had come through it as a teenager to make her Slam main-draw debut. This week she did it again as a twenty-three-year-old Olympic champion. You Xiaodi in the first round, Clara Burel in the second, Elena Pridankina 6-4 3-6 6-0 on Thursday, coming from a set-and-a-break down after the rain break and collapsing on the acrylic of Stadium 17 at the end of it. The Olympic champion had qualified for the US Open.

Kristina Liutova was born in Moscow on the second of February 2010. She was moved to Redmond, Washington, at ten. She has an American green card and has said she would like to represent the United States when the paperwork allows. Six weeks ago she went to Memphis as a qualifier making her WTA-tour debut and won the tournament, beating Darja Vidmanova in the final 1-6 6-1 6-3. She became the tenth player in WTA history to win her debut event, and, at sixteen years and one hundred and seventy-five days, the second-youngest to win a maiden WTA title in the last thirty-six years. Only Coco Gauff, at Linz in 2019, has done it younger. This week Liutova qualified for the US Open main draw without dropping a set. She is the first player born in the 2010s to reach the main draw of a Grand Slam.

They meet in round one. The Olympic champion who had to come back through the qualifying draw meets the sixteen-year-old who could not enter through any other door. It is not the marquee match on Ashe but it is the one worth setting an alarm for.

Dimitrov, after the pec that ended fifty-eight Slams in a row

The set score was 6-3 7-5 2-2 on Court One at Wimbledon on the 7th of July 2025. Grigor Dimitrov, thirty-four, world number nineteen, one-handed backhand, career-high number three, was two sets up on Jannik Sinner in the round of sixteen. He served the fourth game of the third set, walked to the net for a backhand volley, held for two-all, and pulled up clutching his right pectoral. The muscle had partially torn. He retired from the match. Five Grand Slams. Five retirements. A body increasingly voting with its own feet. It also kept him out of the US Open in 2025, ending a streak of fifty-eight consecutive Grand Slams he had played in without a miss going back to 2011.

The comeback took roughly ten months. He was back on the tour by the spring. This week he was the twenty-fifth seed in US Open qualifying and got a walkover in the final round when the Finnish qualifier Otto Virtanen withdrew. Winning ugly, or in this case winning without playing, is still winning. He is back in a Slam main draw for the first time since Wimbledon. His first-round opponent is the Australian Alexei Popyrin, a heavy hitter capable of a five-set match. Whether Dimitrov's chest is still holding is the whole story of his fortnight.

Wong, back where he was a year ago

Twelve months ago Coleman Wong, from Hong Kong, then twenty-one, became the first man playing for Hong Kong to feature in a Grand Slam main draw in the Open Era. He did it by qualifying for the 2025 US Open. He then reached the third round, the best Slam result any Hong Kong player of either sex has produced. The trajectory since has been one direction only. This August he made his ATP top-100 debut at world number ninety-four, the highest ranking any male player from Hong Kong has ever held. Hong Kong tennis is, at the moment, one man wide and higher up than it has ever been. The catch is that his top-100 breakthrough came after the US Open direct-entry deadline closed in July. So the twenty-two-year-old, now inside the top hundred, still had to come back through qualifying to be at the same tournament that made him last year. He beat the former top-thirty Serbian Dusan Lajovic in Thursday's qualifying final 6-4 6-3. His first-round opponent is Tommy Paul, the American world number twenty-one, on Sunday.

Jones, and what she was told at seven

Francesca Jones was diagnosed at birth with ectrodactyly-ectodermal dysplasia-cleft syndrome, a genetic condition that occurs in roughly one in every hundred thousand live births. She has eight fingers rather than ten, seven toes rather than ten, a cleft lip and no sweat glands. She was told at eight that she would not pursue professional sport. She is now twenty-four, the British number three behind Emma Raducanu and Sonay Kartal, career-high world number sixty-five achieved this February, and the winner of WTA 125 titles at Palermo and Rome earlier this year. She came through qualifying as the third seed. She plays the Polish Magda Linette, the former Australian Open semi-finalist, in the first round on Monday. Linette is the favourite. Jones has been told worse things in doctors' offices.

Five matches, one fortnight

Zheng versus Liutova on day one. Sakamoto versus Vukic on Court 7 the day the last-hero handshake fades. Dimitrov versus Popyrin, the return of the one-handed backhand and the fifty-eight-Slam streak. Wong versus Paul, Hong Kong's only man in the draw against the American on his home ground. Jones versus Linette on Monday, the woman told at seven she would not do this against a former Grand Slam semi-finalist. Five backstories. Five matches. Five players who have earned the right to be there through hard slog qualifying rounds and compete at a Slam.

Farhad Roshanaie, one of our All Court pro mentors and coaches, is at Flushing all week with grounds accreditation and reporting back on what actually happens on court rather than what the wire tells us afterwards. We will run follow-ups through the fortnight on any of these five who make it out of round one. That is the point of a piece about qualifiers. The story is not just that they got in, but also about what happens now that they have.

For anyone travelling out for the tournament, the US Open field manual covers things like best sun-shaded-seating in the stadiums, what to eat, why the taxi to JFK is a mistake, water stations, sunscreen tips and other gems. The NYC play guide covers where to hit while you're in the Big Apple.

Round one starts tomorrow.