NEW YORK – The last time Carlos Alcaraz played professional tennis was in April. His right wrist gave out at the Barcelona Open. He would miss the French Open. He would miss Wimbledon. And he would spend four months watching Jannik Sinner win almost everything, unchallenged by the one player in the game who had been consistently matching him.
On Wednesday, Alcaraz posted training footage. His forehand was running at full intensity, the kind of pace and spin that had defined his best tennis before the injury. He was also wearing cornrow braids. Together, the images carried a message the defending US Open champion intended: he is back in preparation mode, and Flushing Meadows is 31 days away.
That is the most any training video can offer. Whether the wrist holds through seven best-of-five matches in the heat of Arthur Ashe Stadium is the question only the tournament itself can answer.
Sinner’s four months provide the context. The Italian, who enters the hardcourt swing as world No. 1, arrived at Wimbledon in July having won five ATP Masters 1000 events in 2026. He defended his Wimbledon title against Alexander Zverev in four sets, taking the last three after dropping the opening tiebreaker, and left London with a season record of 37 wins against one loss. His consistency across clay, grass, and hardcourt has been the dominant narrative of the men’s tour this year. He arrives at Flushing Meadows as the world No. 1 who has never won the tournament.
Sinner, who turns 25 in August, reached the US Open final in 2024 and lost. That gap sits at the center of the 2026 US Open’s defining question: can Alcaraz defend what he won, or has Sinner’s year built an advantage that a four-months-off Alcaraz cannot close in a single fortnight?
Alcaraz last won at Flushing in 2025. He arrived that year with a buzzcut that his brother had accidentally ruined with clippers, a look Frances Tiafoe publicly called “horrible.” Alcaraz won the tournament anyway, then dyed the remnants platinum blonde before leaving New York. He is now a seven-time Grand Slam champion who holds the US Open title. The cornrow braids he debuted Wednesday are, in the context of his Flushing history, less about aesthetics than declaration.
The bridge between the training video and August 30 is Cincinnati. Alcaraz has targeted the Western and Southern Open, August 13 through 23, as his competitive return, Sky Sports reported. He arrives there as the defending Cincinnati champion, having won the 2025 title when Sinner retired from the final. The draw will decide whether his first competitive match back places him against the player who has been unbeatable during his absence.
Sinner will also be in Ohio. So will Zverev, the world No. 2 who won the French Open in June and then lost the Wimbledon final in straight sets. And Novak Djokovic, who confirmed his Cincinnati entry earlier this week, brings a third dimension the draw cannot contain. At 39 and ranked No. 5, Djokovic has built his entire August around a run at his record-extending 25th Grand Slam title at Flushing. He has also entered the US Open mixed doubles alongside Aryna Sabalenka. His last competitive match was a Wimbledon semi-final loss to Sinner in July. Whether a six-week break before Cincinnati arrives as sharpness or rust will not be knowable until he plays.
The women’s draw introduces its own volatility. Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, and Coco Gauff have divided recent Grand Slam titles in a pattern that suggests no single player has Flushing’s format sufficiently figured out. Gauff, who won the US Open in 2023 at 19, arrives at 22 with the home crowd’s warmth and the weight it brings. She has not won a second major. Naomi Osaka’s results in Washington this week showed her capable of real disruption inside a draw, though whether that capacity holds across a Grand Slam fortnight remains one of the 2026 Open’s genuinely open questions.
A year ago, the hairstyle Alcaraz chose at Flushing had no bearing on what happened inside Arthur Ashe. He looked unprepared before the first serve. He did not play that way. The 2026 version of that story is inverted: the braids and the training footage look deliberate. Whether the body behind them is genuinely tournament-ready is what the next 31 days will determine, beginning in Cincinnati and ending at a place only seven best-of-five matches can take him.
The numbers Sinner has compiled since April establish what the defending champion must meet. Yahoo Sports reported the Italian at 37-1 on the season heading into the hardcourt swing, a mark built without the player who is now posting training videos and hairstyle changes in preparation. A wrist injury and four months away from professional competition does not reset what Sinner has constructed. Whether Alcaraz has the physical foundation to close that gap before August 30 is a question nobody in the draw has yet answered, because the tournament has not yet asked it.
