In the women’s category, American tennis has not experienced a major dip, even if the difficulty in confirming has always been present. From now on, both in the men’s and women’s categories, a quarter of the world top 20 is occupied by US players.
Taylor Fritz (12e), Ben Shelton (13e), Tommy Paul (14e), Sebastian Korda (16th) and Frances Tiafoe (20th) are neck and neck among the men.
Among the ladies, we even find two players in the top 10 and therefore also a total of 5 players in the top 20: Coco Gauff (3e), Jessica Pegula (6e), Danielle Collins (11e), Emma Navarro (12th) and Madison Keys (14e).
So the quality is there, but what all these players lacked was the ability to go far in a grand slam. Coco Gauff is the only one who has managed to win a grand slam and even the only one to have reached the final among these 10 players.
In the men’s event, three of the five have already made it to the semi-finals: Ben Shelton (US Open 2023), Tommy Paul (Australian Open 2023) and Frances Tiafoe (US Open 2022). For Taylor Fritz, this will be a first Grand Slam semi-final at 26 years old, while Sebastian Korda did not do better than a round of 16 for his very first Grand Slam, Roland-Garros 2020.
In the women’s competition, Coco Gauff has a Grand Slam under her belt and has reached two semi-finals but was eliminated by Emma Navarro in the round of 16 at Wimbledon and at this US Open. Jessica Pegula will discover her first semi-final at 30 after great consistency and five quarter-finals. Danielle Collins has always been inconsistent but still played in the final of the Australian Open in 2022. The same inconsistency played tricks on Madison Keys, who played in the final of the US Open in 2017 and has since experienced four semi-finals without being able to go any further. Emma Navarro is the youngest and, at the age of 23, will discover the semi-final stage after gaining momentum with a round of 16 at Roland-Garros and a quarter-final at Wimbledon this season.
