Preview: Cincinnati gets used to first-time champions | ATP Tour

Cincinnati

Preview: Cincinnati gets used to first-time champions

Sinner and Tiafoe will play the final this Monday at 18:00

August 19, 2024

After Roger Federer set the record for most Cincinnati Open titles in 2015 when he won his seventh final, the Ohio tournament became one of the most unpredictable ATP Masters 1000 tournaments.

So much so that, since the 2016 edition, four players have won their first title at this level at this event: Marin Cilic (2016), Grigor Dimitrov (2017), Daniil Medvedev (2019) and Borna Coric (2022). In addition, Alexander Zverev became the champion of this tournament for the first time in 2021.

The list of first-time winners in the history of this event will continue to grow when the 56th final of the Open Era (since 1968) concludes on Monday. The protagonists? Jannik Sinner and Frances Tiafoe, first-time finalists of this event.

The first of them comes here after two three-set battles in his last two outings. First against Andrey Rublev, with whom he had to come back from 0-1 in sets; and then against Alexander Zverev, whom he had not beaten since Roland Garros 2020.

Becoming the first Italian to reach the final of this tournament also allows him to advance to a final for the fifth time in the season, in which he has four titles. The No. 1 in the PIF ATP Rankings will enter the final confident of not having lost a championship match since last November at the Nitto ATP Finals (l. to Djokovic).

If he remains unbeaten, in addition to winning his third Masters 1000 title (he also prevailed at Canada 2023 and Miami 2024), he would move 2,300 points ahead of No. 2 Novak Djokovic in the next update of the rankings. It would mark a big step toward a goal of being the year-end No. 1, an honor presented by PIF.

But he will face Frances Tiafoe and the American public who will want a local player to win this event for the first time since Andy Roddick did it in 2006. The No. 27 in the PIF ATP Rankings will be playing in his first ATP Masters 1000 final after beating Holger Rune by coming back from 2-5 down in the third set and saving two match points.

The result vaulted him to No. 20 in the live rankings (he began the week as No. 27 in the world), so starting with the next update of the rankings there will be five Americans in the Top 20 (also Fritz, Shelton, Paul and Korda) for the first time since the week of Feb. 24, 1997.

But a win over Sinner, against whom he has a 1-3 record, would see him climb to No. 17, as well as reach four career ATP Tour titles. None as big, in any case, as the one at stake on Monday from 6 p.m. local time.