Two hours of tennis, two hours of waiting
Elena Rybakina needed most of a day to deal with Magdalena Frech. The scoreline reads 6-4, 7-6 (7/2), which looks tidy enough. Everything around it was not.
Play at the Cincinnati Open in Mason, Ohio, halted twice, each interruption lasting close to an hour. Roughly two hours of actual tennis ended up spread across an afternoon that kept resetting itself. Rybakina cooled down, warmed up, walked back out under the same heavy sky, and started again.
“It was a crazy day, to be honest, coming out every time into clouds and humidity,” the Kazakh said afterwards. “I was on top of the ball in the tie-break but it was a difficult one.”
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Frech made her earn the second set
The first set went with a single break. The second did not go anywhere for a long time, Frech holding on until the tie-break, where Rybakina finally found the timing she had been chasing all afternoon and took it 7-2.
That takes the two-time Grand Slam champion into the fourth round of a tournament where the rain had already scrambled the schedule for both draws. Conditions like Monday’s tend to punish players who rely on rhythm. Rybakina relies on a serve and a first strike, which travels better through interruptions than most games on tour, and it showed in the way she closed out the tie-break rather than the way she played the hour before it.
A stop-start Monday in Mason
She was not the only seed grinding through it. Jessica Pegula, a finalist here in 2024, came past compatriot Emma Navarro 7-5, 6-2 on the same afternoon of delays.
The US Open is a fortnight away, which gives this week a particular weight for anyone still adjusting to hard courts. Monday offered very little in the way of clean preparation. Rybakina got the win anyway, which was the point.
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