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Welcome to the U.S. Open briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories on each day of the tournament.

On Day 7, a star got back to a long-awaited milestone, the tournament’s five-set heroes hit a wall, and a defending champion escaped adversity.

Naomi Osaka climbs back after four years away

Here’s something a little hard to believe. The last time Naomi Osaka was in the second week of a Grand Slam, much of the world remained half-closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The second week of the 2021 Australian Open included a snap lockdown. It had Osaka playing matches in nearly empty stadiums before she beat Jennifer Brady to win the fourth of her four Grand Slam titles to date. Osaka had yet to be vulnerable in public about the impact of the sport on her well-being. She hadn’t taken any of her breaks from the tour to manage that impact, nor her 16-month hiatus for pregnancy and childbirth.

But with a stirring three-set win over Daria Kasatkina of Australia on Saturday, Osaka set up a fourth-round U.S. Open date with Coco Gauff, a can’t-miss match if ever there was one. It’s where Osaka wished she had been for going on two years, ever since she started her tennis comeback in 2024.

She has come close twice. At both the Australian Open and Wimbledon this year, she fell one match short.

“Since I’ve come back, I kind of wanted everything to happen really quickly,” Osaka said after her 6-0, 4-6, 6-3 win. It took the Wimbledon loss to revert to focusing on process rather than results, as she had been doing through most of last year. Then things turned; now they have turned back.

“As a journey, it’s not something that I really pictured, but I’m glad to be living it,” she said.

The run is also a victory for Tomasz Wiktorowski, Iga Świątek’s former coach who replaced Patrick Mouratoglou on team Osaka in July. Mouratoglou replaced Wim Fissette last year. Fissette, who helped Osaka to two Grand Slam titles, is now coaching Świątek and won Wimbledon with her.

— Matt Futterman

Jannik Sinner meets a familiar enemy — and prevails again

There are two players who have really pushed Jannik Sinner at the Grand Slams this year — who are not named Carlos Alcaraz.

One is Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov, who led the world No. 1 by two sets before injury cruelly struck at Wimbledon. Saturday at the U.S. Open, Canada’s Denis Shapovalov made his party of one a duet. Shapovalov won the first set, had a point for a double-break lead in the third and another one for a break back in the final game of the fourth before ultimately succumbing to Sinner 5-7, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.

There are some obvious links between the two. Both are flashy shotmakers who play with a single-handed backhand, which is increasingly rare in professional tennis. Both used the backhand slice very effectively to move the Italian out of position before pulling the trigger on both wings into the space he had vacated. Both also served exceptionally well for the period in which they were in the ascendancy.

The extent to which this is a repeatable formula outside of serving is limited, as very few players on the tour have as much upside on the backhand slice combined with ball speed to keep Sinner off balance. Saturday was still a reminder that he isn’t invulnerable and can get flustered, especially in the heat of the afternoon.

As he said himself with a smile in his post-match news conference: “I’m not a machine, you know. I also struggle sometimes.”

— Charlie Eccleshare

The U.S. Open’s five-setters hit a wall in New York

There was a grim inevitability about Flavio Cobolli’s mid-match retirement against his compatriot Lorenzo Musetti Saturday. Cobolli had 10 sets in his legs, and that tends to be detrimental to a player’s chances in a major these days, if not a death knell against an opponent of the No. 10 seed’s quality. A right arm injury was what did it for Cobolli on this occasion, who retired down 6-3, 6-2, 2-0.

Later that, Kamil Majchrzak had to retire hurt in the first set of his match against Leandro Reidi. In his previous match, Majchrzak had beaten No. 9 seed Karen Khachanov and saved match points before winning in a fifth-set tiebreak. He won the first three games against Riedi but was visibly hampered from the start and never looked like finishing the first set, let alone reaching the third round. It was little surprise he should succumb to the physical toll that a match longer than 4 1/2 hours puts on a player’s body.

And then Daniel Altmaier, who beat Stefanos Tsitsipas in five in the previous round, suffered the same fate as Majchrzak and Cobolli against Alex de Minaur.

A similar dynamic played out at the Australian Open in January, when there was a sequence of retirements and physical blowouts on the middle weekend from players who couldn’t withstand the rigors of consistent five-set tennis.

At first glance, it suggests playing five sets at Grand Slams is not entirely fit for purpose. If match lengths have increased and the depth of talent on the tour has grown to such an extent that a couple of five-set matches put too much of a physical strain on a player, then there is an issue.

The sheer volume of tennis played has also increased, however. The rest of the tournaments on the ATP Tour are three sets, but the biggest tournaments below the Grand Slams, the Masters 1000s, have extended from one week to 12 days. It is not that a format played four times per year, with days off between matches, is an outlier so much that five sets is an even more physically taxing cherry on top of an ever-growing cake. That growth then dilutes the quality of the most visible and important product in tennis, with the early rounds wearing down players who are carrying accumulated fatigue from the rest of the calendar.

The best players don’t or shouldn’t become embroiled in multiple five-set matches early on, and a seed like Cobolli might feel he only has himself to blame after being taken the distance in matches he should have won a lot more comfortably. However, the ultimate result of matches getting longer and more physical is that on the men’s side, only a few players can be truly competitive at the sharp end of slams. For most, a couple of five-set matches and that’s them pretty much done.

— Charlie Eccleshare

Other notable results on Day 7

• Coco Gauff (3) set up the Osaka clash with an ordinary win during what has so far for her been an extraordinary tournament. Gauff beat No. 28 seed Magdalena Fręch 6-3, 6-1 in a straightforward match that followed two challenging, surreal and at times emotional wins on Arthur Ashe Stadium.

• Andrey Rublev (15) survived a scare against Coleman Wong, the qualifier from Hong Kong who this week became its first man to win a Grand Slam match in the Open era. Wong led by a set and came back to force a decider from 2-1 down, but Rublev prevailed 2-6, 6-4, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3.

• Iga Świątek (2) produced an even more remarkable comeback to open the night session. Anna Kalinskaya (29) led the Wimbledon champion 5-1 on Arthur Ashe Stadium, but Świątek fought her way into a tiebreak and took the set and then the match a little while later, 7-6(2), 6-4.

• And Tommy Paul (14) almost did the impossible against Alexander Bublik (23) in his second five-setter on Arthur Ashe Stadium in a row. Despite being on the edge physically for at least the last two sets, he ran Bublik close before bowing out as the Kazakh triumphed 7-6(5), 6-7(4), 6-3, 6-7(5), 6-1.

Shot of the day

Jannik Sinner and Denis Shapovalov produced one of the points of the tournament.

Up next

🎾 Jessica Pegula (4) vs. Ann Li
11 a.m. ET on ESPN2/ESPN+

Li, who reached her first WTA Tour final in seven months at the final warm-up tournament before this U.S. Open, gets another crack at Pegula at a Grand Slam in 2025. They met in the first round of the French Open, in which Li, 25, took her more experienced and higher-ranked opponent to a second-set tiebreak before ultimately losing.

🎾 Barbora Krejčíková vs. Taylor Townsend
2 p.m. ET (estimated) on ESPN2/ESPN+

Townsend, who has become the star of the tournament the past few days, gets a singles matchup in which most of the intrigue comes from doubles pedigree. Krejčíková has a major singles-court advantage with her two Grand Slam titles, but she and Townsend are both Grand Slam doubles champions. Townsend used her doubles skills to fillet No. 5 seed Mirra Andreeva in the previous round; Krejčíková will be able to see them coming.

🎾 Tomáš Macháč (21) vs. Taylor Fritz (4)
4 p.m. ET (estimated) on ESPN2/ESPN+

Another match full of intrigue, for very different reasons. Macháč, a Czech with all the talent in the world but whose body has a habit of letting him down, last met Fritz, the 2024 U.S. Open finalist, at January’s United Cup. They played the men’s singles rubber in the mixed international team competition, and Macháč led 7-6(4), 5-6 — after Fritz had saved two match points down 5-2 in the second set — when he abruptly retired with cramp in his legs.

🎾 Elena Rybakina (9) vs. Markéta Vondroušová
9:30 p.m. ET (estimated) on ESPN2/ESPN+

A fascinating contrast of styles between two Wimbledon champions closes the night session on Arthur Ashe Stadium. Rybakina’s devastating power and linear attack stand against Vondroušová’s trigonometric variety, but both players execute their games with a languid effortlessness that emphasizes their talent. Vondroušová will look to keep the ball out of the Kazakh’s strike zone, and Rybakina will look to get her Czech opponent outside the sidelines before it happens to her.

U.S. Open men’s draw 2025U.S. Open women’s draw 2025

Tell us what you noticed on the seventh day …

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic / Getty Images)