Carlos Alcaraz Returns to US Open with Electrifying Performance
Carlos Alcaraz walked back into Arthur Ashe Stadium on Monday night not as a curiosity, not as a question mark, but as the defending US Open champion with 139 days of frustration to burn off.
By the end, the message was clear: he is back, and he is in a mood.
The seven-time major winner, out for more than four months with a wrist injury, brushed aside Russia’s Roman Safiullin 6-4 6-4 6-4, launching his title defence with the kind of electricity New York has come to expect from him. The scoreline was tidy. The performance, at times, was anything but restrained.
The show returns to Ashe
Alcaraz came out with a compression sleeve on his right arm and a grin that never seemed to leave his face. If there were nerves about the wrist, they never made it to the surface.
He missed Roland Garros. He missed Wimbledon. He watched Alexander Zverev lift the French Open trophy and Jannik Sinner take Wimbledon, forced into the role of spectator while his generation’s great rivals carved up the season’s biggest prizes.
Now it is his turn again.
"I missed the crowd, the energy, the competition – I missed everything," he said on court, smiling as if the whole evening had been a release. "I'm just really, really happy that I was able to compete again."
From the first game, he leaned on the shot that has always separated him: that whippy, violent forehand. The sleeve might have suggested caution; the ball told a different story. The forehand produced the bulk of his 28 winners, tearing through Safiullin’s defences and reasserting a familiar hierarchy on the Ashe hard court.
"I felt great," Alcaraz said. "I don't know how it looked from outside, but from inside, my feeling was that I was hitting normal. I was playing pretty normal, playing my style, and everything felt great."
Noise, joy and a little Michael Jackson
Every winner came with a clenched fist and a roar of “vamos” in the direction of his box. This wasn’t a tentative return. It was a celebration.
The 23-year-old played with the joy of someone who had been reminded how quickly it can all be taken away. He smiled after points, joked with his team, and at one changeover casually sang along to a Michael Jackson track drifting through the stadium speakers.
The crowd responded. Of course they did. This is exactly why New York has taken to him so quickly.
When he capped a brutal rally late in the third set with a feathered drop shot in his final service game, he froze for a heartbeat, then punched the air, pointed to his ear and waved his arms, demanding more noise from the stands. Arthur Ashe obliged.
Former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash, watching on BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra, noted that it looked as though “every little win” was being savoured by Alcaraz. That was the point.
"What I really want to do is enjoy every time that I'm going to walk into the court, feeling the energy from the people," Alcaraz said. "That's what I'm going do this tournament. The results, it's going to come after all. That's why I enjoyed so much today, and it wasn't a surprise for me, because I came here to enjoy."
Rust, risk and a vulnerable serve
For all the fireworks, this was not a flawless performance. The wrist held up, the movement looked sharp, but the serve told the story of a player still searching for rhythm.
Alcaraz produced only two aces and coughed up five double faults. The raw numbers were solid enough – 68% of first serves in, winning 66% of those points – yet the usual bite on his delivery was missing.
"The serve is the shot I was struggling [with] the most," he admitted. He also revealed that some of that drop in pace was by design, an attempt to disrupt Safiullin’s timing. "I'm going try to serve better. The point is going to try to serve normal, but it's a shot that I just always struggle [with]. But it will be back, for sure."
He did not look short of fitness, but five-set tennis is its own examination. Even Alcaraz, so often the embodiment of swagger, conceded that doubt had crept in before the match.
"There were some doubts in the match, I'm not going to lie," he said. "I've been thinking about 'am I going to last the best of five, am I going to last playing four sets, five sets?'."
"I need more matches under the belt to get again into the rhythm of the tournament. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get better and better every day."
If this is the baseline of his level after four and a half months away, that is an ominous thought for the rest of the field.
A draw that suddenly looks different
Safiullin, ranked 99 in the world, will not be the toughest opponent Alcaraz faces in New York. The next step is Portugal’s Jaime Faria, the world number 72, in round two.
The landscape around him, though, has shifted dramatically in the past 48 hours.
World number one Jannik Sinner is not in the draw at all, sidelined by a knee problem. Novak Djokovic, the 24-time major champion and the man who has defined this era, crashed out in a stunning first-round defeat to Argentina’s Mariano Navone on Sunday.
Title threats are falling away. Doors are opening.
As the second seed, Alcaraz sits on the opposite side of the draw to French Open champion and top seed Alexander Zverev. A rematch of their growing rivalry can only happen in the final now.
On Monday, another supposed contender disappeared from his half of the draw. French 10th seed Arthur Fils, fresh from winning the Cincinnati Masters and widely tipped as a dark horse for the title, went out to Stefanos Tsitsipas.
The upshot? Before the semi-finals, the only top-10 player Alcaraz can face is American Ben Shelton, potentially in the quarter-finals. For a defending champion still working his way back from injury, it is as generous a path as he could have hoped for.
Yet watching him under the Ashe lights, fist pumping, shouting “vamos”, singing at the changeovers and begging the crowd for more, you sensed that the draw is almost secondary.
He has his racket back in his hand. He has New York at full volume. Now the question is no longer whether he can last five sets.
It is who, in this suddenly fractured field, can stop him.
