“reimagination” of the mixed doubles.<\/a><\/p>\nAs well as the huge financial incentives, the event has also been moved forward to the week before the singles main draws to attract the stars.<\/p>\n
Raducanu and Alcaraz teaming up for the glamorous event – which has controversially deviated from its traditional format and polarised opinion – created many of the pre-tournament headlines.<\/p>\n
There was a fear they might not turn out at all, given Alcaraz played in the final of an ATP event in Cincinnati on Monday.<\/p>\n
But the pair walked out together on the US Open’s main show court little over 24 hours later to a euphoric reception of screams and shouts.<\/p>\n
An excitable atmosphere continued as the fans – who paid between $25 and $145 for what British doubles player Jamie Murray described as a “glorified exhibition” – danced to tunes played by an on-court DJ and acted up when appearing on the big screen.<\/p>\n
Both sets of players smiled and laughed throughout, further illustrating how the stars are using the event to tune up for their greater priority of the singles.<\/p>\n
For some, it underlined the view of the doubles specialists sidelined that a Grand Slam tournament had lost value.<\/p>\n
Pegula, who has been ranked world number one in the women’s doubles, and Draper were also a scratch pairing but had too much quality against a pair who are less experienced in tour-level doubles.<\/p>\n
For Draper, it was third time lucky – having seen previous planned partners Zheng Qinwen and Paula Badosa withdraw through injury.<\/p>\n
Pegula and Draper will play either Serbia’s Olga Danilovic and Novak Djokovic or Russia’s Mirra Andreeva and Daniil Medvedev in the last eight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emma Raducanu and Carlos Alcaraz might have lost in the revamped US Open mixed doubles – but they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-78622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}