US Open mixed doubles: Karolina Muchova and Jakub Mensik win $1 million tournament
Karolina Muchova and Jakub Mensik won the US Open’s unique mixed doubles tournament on Wednesday, taking home a $1 million grand prize (or $500,000 each). Which isn’t bad for two days’ work.
As the clock neared midnight in New York, the Czechs defeated Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli 6-3, 1-6, 10-6 in front of a crowd thinned out by the late hour. Both teams had already played a three-set semifinal earlier in the evening.
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The 30-year-old Muchova and 20-year-old Mensik, who were unseeded, won the later semifinal against the Russian pairing of Mirra Andreeva and Andrey Rublev. With a turnaround of less than an hour, they pounced early, breaking Bencic’s serve and coasting to a first-set win.
Bencic and Cobolli, seeded No. 4, bounced back to take the second set in lopsided fashion, but a run of four straight points in the 10-point third-set tiebreaker left the Czechs with room for error.
The big-serving Mensik closed things out with a 131-mph ace.
In addition to Andreeva and Rublev, the champions defeated the pairings of Kristina Mladenovic and Marcelo Arévalo in the first round and Emma Navarro and Tommy Paul in the quarterfinal.
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Technically, it is a first career Grand Slam title for both players. The reality is a bit more complicated.
Last year’s US Open mixed doubles spectacle ended very differently
This was the second year of the US Open’s new mixed doubles format, which took a little-watched — but still meaningful to the participants — part of the event and turned it into more of a spectacle held the week before the main draws of the tournament, with a bevy of singles stars in a 16-team field and tweaked rules to shorten matches.
Outside of the final, sets were played to only four games. Games were played with no ads and decisive third sets were played as 10-point tiebreakers. All 15 matches of the tournament were played on Tuesday and Wednesday. And there was that $1 million prize, up from $200,000 in 2024.
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With the exception of the prize money, it had all the trappings of an exhibition event. But the organizers still insisted there was a real Grand Slam title on the line, just with rules completely different from every other Grand Slam in history.
It was a controversial move by the tournament, especially because it took away all but a handful of opportunities from doubles specialists in the name of star power. Those specialists were seemingly vindicated in the first run when the defending mixed doubles champion team of Andrea Vavassori and Sara Errani won the title, defeating the likes of Iga Swiatek, Casper Ruud, Karolina Muchova, Andrey Rublev, Elena Rybakina and Taylor Fritz along the way.
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There was no such vindication this year. Among the four traditional doubles teams in the field, three were eliminated in the first round. Kateřina Siniaková and Henry Patten took out the top seed of Aryna Sabalenka and Novak Djokovic, then lost to the married couple of Elina Svitolina and Gael Monfils.
Among the four players on the court in the final, Mensik was the lowest ranked singles player at No. 18 with the ATP.