Four hours and 38 minutes
Alex Michelsen had not dropped a set all fortnight. He was two sets up on Frances Tiafoe and serving for the match at 5-4 in the third. Then he opened that game with two double faults, Tiafoe broke, and the whole thing came apart.
The final line reads 5-7, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (10-6) to the No. 11 seed. Tiafoe was also 3-0 down in the deciding set before he turned it around a second time. When the tiebreak finally ended he had been on court for four hours and 38 minutes.
What happened next made the round. Tiafoe jogged to the far side of the net and Michelsen, 22 years old and playing his first major quarterfinal, cried on his shoulder.
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“I just wanted to come up there and dap him up”
“I really like Alex. I really, really do,” Tiafoe said. “I didn’t think it was going to be as long as it was, but I understand the moment. He was definitely crying on my shoulders. Yeah, we just had some words for each other, and that was it.”
Michelsen described what he heard. “I was trying to keep it together and I didn’t do a good job of that. He was saying a lot of nice personal things. ‘You’ll be there. When I’m older, you’re going to be here, and we’re going to play it again in this type of circumstance.’ He’s a great guy for consoling me in that moment.”
Tiafoe was honest about how badly he had started. “It wasn’t good, let’s put it that way. It wasn’t good. Three out of five is a blessing, because you have time to get it together. I definitely waited for the last minute.”
The company he keeps now
Nobody had come back from two sets down in a US Open men’s quarterfinal since Roger Federer did it to Gael Monfils in 2014. Tiafoe is only the fifth man to manage it in the Open era. The last US Open men’s quarterfinal to reach a deciding tiebreak also involved Monfils, against Matteo Berrettini in 2019.
It is Tiafoe’s third major semifinal, all of them in New York, after 2022 and 2024. The result also guarantees him a return to the top 10 in next week’s rankings, a place he has not held since September 2023.
Michelsen falls to 0-6 in five-setters and loses a four-match winning run. Tiafoe plays the winner of Carlos Alcaraz and Ben Shelton, with American men still waiting on a Grand Slam title since Andy Roddick in 2003.
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