The Athletic has live coverage from Day 6 of the 2025 U.S. Open.
FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — To adapt the old saw about people going broke, Taylor Townsend’s rise to fame was fast, and then it was slow. At this summer’s U.S. Open, it has happened all at once.
At 29, Townsend has become what a lot of people in tennis thought she would be when she was a teenager: A big-time figure in her sport and one of the most talked-about athletes in America. Far fewer people thought it would happen like this for the American, a lefty with a dangerous combination of touch and power when she has both working at the same time.
Almost no one.
“I truly believe that everyone has their own path,” Townsend, the No. 1 doubles player in the world, said earlier this week. That was two days before the explosion on Court 11 at the end of her win over Jelena Ostapenko, which took her into the third round of the singles at the U.S. Open for the first time since 2019.
“Tennis is one of the sports where a lot of the players and even the people around it are cursed with comparison, and everyone looks at their counterparts and what everybody else is doing and compares your journey to theirs.”
She talked about having fallen into that trap, of wondering why she didn’t become overnight the thing that everyone told her she would. Then she recalled being a little kid, learning the sport in Chicago and then Atlanta, and writing down her goals.
“I said that I wanted to create and have a legacy,” she said. “And that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Townsend, whose image has been on just every sports and news highlight show since about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday evening, has been doing it for some time.
She grew up on public courts in the South Side of Chicago, before moving to Atlanta to stay with a tennis program run by Donald and Ilona Young, the parents of former junior No. 1 Donald Young. In 2012, she won the junior singles competition at the Australian Open and the junior doubles at Wimbledon, on her way to becoming the world No. 1 junior at 16. She was the shining star of the revamped development program at the United States Tennis Association (USTA), which Patrick McEnroe and Jose Higueras launched in 2008.
Ahead of the 2012 U.S. Open, the USTA declined to give Townsend a wild card into either the main draw or the qualifying tournament, following a disagreement with Townsend’s family over whether she was fit enough to play. Townsend’s mother, Sheila, a former college tennis player, told The Wall Street Journal that the family perceived the decision as an attack on Townsend’s physique. In an essay for the Players’ Tribune, published in 2021, Townsend said that she had anemia at the time of the decision, which had an effect on her fitness.
In a statement issued during the tournament thirteen years ago, McEnroe spoke only in general terms.
“Our concern is her long-term health, number one, and her long-term development as a player. We have one goal in mind: For her to be playing in [Arthur Ashe Stadium] in the main draw and competing for major titles when it’s time. That’s how we make every decision, based on that.”
The controversy put Townsend at the center of a growing discussion about female athletes and their bodies at an age when no person would want their body placed under a microscope.
In the ensuing years, Townsend struggled to figure out what kind of tennis player she was as she tried to fulfil the promise of her junior career. She became a mother at 24, worked as a television analyst during her maternity leave, then began a climb back with one simple goal: trying to become better than the player she was before she gave birth to her son, Adyn Aubrey.
Last year, she rose to a career high No. 47 in the singles rankings. This summer, she became the world No. 1 in doubles, after winning the 2024 Wimbledon and 2025 Australian Open women’s titles with Kateřina Siniaková. Her success, and the way in which she has achieved it on and off the court, has turned her into a crowd favorite and a kind of tennis folk hero, especially in the U.S.
Fans flock to her match to see those deadly angled volleys and a thumping serve and forehand, but also the Townsend vibes: the fist-pumps, the head nods, the roars and waving arms after big shots, that dovetail with the care and attention for those in her orbit.
“The best,” No. 31 seed Leylah Fernandez said of the experience of playing with Townsend, describing it as a tonic for the soul. They reached the 2023 French Open final, with Townsend pumping up her devastated Canadian partner after a defeat to Hsieh Su-wei and Wang Xinyu.
All of this, it turns out, was a prelude for this year’s U.S. Open, where she teamed up with Ben Shelton to form the crowd’s favorite team in the mixed doubles last week. They fell in the second round, and Townsend quickly pivoted to the singles and women’s doubles, becoming one of just a handful of players to play all three events.
Taylor Townsend and Ben Shelton also played together at the 2023 U.S. Open, reaching the mixed doubles semifinals. (Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)
She took the court for the singles in a black dress she designed for own clothing line, the rim of the skirt lined with flames, and won her first-round match against Antonia Ružić of Croatia.
“I’m an Aries, so I’m a fire sign,” she said after the straight-sets win. I wore fire today.”
She was wearing it again in her second-round duel with Ostapenko, the occasionally lethal but often erratic Latvian.
Ostapenko surged to an early lead but soon came back to earth, as Townsend got her teeth and the crowd into the match. Late in the first set Townsend fired a forehand that ticked the net. Ostapenko chased after it and nudged the ball back. Townsend volleyed a lob into the open court.
Townsend, who said she was shocked the ball went over, accepted her good fortune and rode the momentum into the next point and on to a 7-5, 6-1 victory. At the net, during the post-match handshake, Ostapenko unleashed on her for not apologizing for the net cord. The 2017 French Open champion appeared to tell Townsend, who is Black, that she has “no education.”
Townsend went right back at Ostapenko, pointing at her and circling her arm as she left the court, urging the crowd to lay it on thick. They obliged.
“It’s one of the worst things you can say to a Black tennis player in a majority White sport,” two-time U.S. Open champion Naomi Osaka said Thursday of the incident. “I know Taylor and I know how hard she’s worked and I know how smart she is, so she’s the furthest thing from uneducated or anything like that.”
“I think it’s ill-timing and the worst person you could have ever said it to,” Osaka added. “And I don’t know if she knows the history of it in America.”
Ostapenko, who left the Billie Jean King Tennis Center immediately after her match with Townsend, declined to speak Thursday after a loss in the women’s doubles, citing medical issues in a message circulated by the USTA.
Less than an hour after the end of the match, knowing everything she was about to say would be scrutinized and dissected by more people than ever before, Townsend said that she had heard and experienced stuff like this before. She recalled a doubles match at a lower-tier tournament in Virginia with no ball kids. An opponent kept smacking balls onto the neighboring courts, Townsend said, forcing her to schlep between points to fetch them. She and her partner, Asia Muhammad, won, and Townsend had words with her opponent after.
“I’m just not going to tolerate disrespect, you’re not going to disrespect me in my face,” she said.
“I’m a firm believer and I’m the type of person where if you have something to say, you feel some type of way, you say it to my face, and we can talk about it, we can hash it out. It is what it is, but I stand strong and I stand firm in who I am. I don’t back down from confrontation.”
She said she watches sports because they reveal personalities, showing how people act in pressure situations.
She hadn’t gotten any form of an apology from Ostapenko, who accused Townsend of violating tennis rules. Townsend said she didn’t much care what Ostapenko had to say or what her motives were, only that the Latvian would have to speak for whether or not her comments carried racial undertones. Then she went on court with Siniaková the next day and won her first doubles match. She plays Mirra Andreeva, the No. 5 seed, Friday night last on Arthur Ashe Stadium. About 24,000 people should be there to roar her forward, some who have known her for a long time, and some for a little.
Townsend had already spent plenty of years listening to what others had to say about her, measuring herself against the accomplishments and behavior of others. She was and is done with that, focusing on herself and on behaving in a way that will make her son proud one day when he learns about all this.
“I know that I’m a fantastic tennis player, and I know that I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish, and this is another stepping stone,” she said.
“It’s another brick that I’m laying on my foundation or on my road to greatness.”
(Top photo: Frank Franklin II / Associated Press)