Zheng Qinwen's Remarkable Comeback at US Open
Zheng Qinwen dropped to the court, then sprang back up, punching the air. It wasn’t just a win. It was a reclamation.
The 2024 Olympic gold medallist fought her way into the US Open third round on Thursday, edging Yulia Putintseva 6-4, 2-6, 6-1, and with it signalled something more important than simple progress at a Grand Slam: the return of her game, and of the edge that once made her look inevitable.
“Before the surgery, for me winning is like drinking water -- everything comes natural, everything comes fluent,” Zheng said after the match.
For a long time, it had looked that way. A former world number four, she had risen with a kind of smooth inevitability, her power and poise pushing her deep into the sport’s elite.
Then came 2025.
An elbow operation, followed by a recovery that dragged on longer than expected, ripped all that rhythm away. She missed the Australian Open. She missed months of matches. More damaging than any ranking slide, she lost the feeling that had once separated her from the pack.
“After my surgery, I had some tough matches against the best players in the world (and) I'm close but I don't get them,” she admitted. “I totally lost the dynamic of how to compete.”
That sentence, from a player who not long ago looked like one of the game’s most ruthless front-runners, tells the story of her year. Points she once closed, she let slip. Matches she used to squeeze, she watched drift away. The mechanics of winning, so instinctive before, suddenly needed rebuilding.
The rebuild started in a place that would have seemed unthinkable not so long ago: qualifying.
Her ranking had fallen so sharply she needed to fight through the US Open preliminaries just to make the main draw. For a player who “used to always play on the big court,” the reality of starting on the outer courts, with sparse crowds and little fanfare, cut deep.
“It takes a while for me to accept my ranking dropped to 125 and, OK, I need to actually play qualies,” she said. The words “actually play qualies” carried as much sting as honesty.
Yet those days in qualifying may have given her exactly what she had been missing. The grind. The urgency. The feeling that every point, every game, every hour on court matters. She acknowledged as much, even if the pride in her voice came mixed with reluctance.
By the time she walked onto court against Putintseva, the competitive instincts that had gone missing for months started to flicker again. The match itself traced Zheng’s year in miniature.
She took the first set 6-4, then lost her grip as Putintseva stormed through the second 6-2, dragging Zheng back into doubt. The deciding set became a test of nerve as much as shotmaking. This time, Zheng didn’t blink. She surged through it 6-1, her game suddenly snapping into focus.
“Now after two, three months I really felt the first time in this tournament I find myself, I found my fire back during the competition,” she said.
The result put her in the third round. The manner of it suggested something more: that the old champion’s mindset is edging back.
Her reward is a meeting with former Australian Open champion Madison Keys, a step up in power, profile and pressure. It is also likely her ticket back to one of the show courts at Flushing Meadows after two rounds spent working in the shadows.
Zheng is hungry for that stage again. “I used to always play on the big court,” she said. “I need to fight to get everything back.”
The ranking, the aura, the prime-time slots. She knows none of it will be handed to her now. That may be exactly why she looks dangerous again.
