This Week in Tennis: Swiatek Ends Her Drought, Djokovic Hits a Wall

The Djokovic Cincinnati health scare was the story of the week — but Toronto crowned a champion who badly needed one first.

Iga Swiatek’s 2026 season had been defined by near-misses until Thursday night at Sobeys Stadium. The seventh seed capped a stellar run in Toronto with a dominant 6-2, 6-3 win over World No. 2 Elena Rybakina in just 75 minutes to claim her first title of the season. It wasn’t just her first title of the year — it was a career sweep of North America’s major hard-court tournaments at just 25, and her twelfth WTA 1000 crown, moving her past Aryna Sabalenka (11) for the second-most since the format debuted in 2009, trailing only Serena Williams (13).

Swiatek Completes the North American Sweep

The path there told its own story. Swiatek worked through Sara Bejlek, Viktorija Golubic, Marta Kostyuk, Diana Shnaider and Elina Svitolina en route to the final, picking up three Top 20 wins along the way — the first time she’d done that at a single event since her 2024 Roland Garros title run. See the full Toronto draw and results on the WTA’s official site. The final itself was a formality once it started: she broke immediately, held throughout the first set, and broke again late to close it out 6-2, never facing a break point of her own until midway through the second. Rybakina had one push left — she steadied to lead 2-1 in the second set, but Swiatek won five of the last six games, saving off a match point Rybakina forced before finally converting.

What made it notable beyond the trophy: Swiatek arrived in Toronto having not reached a single final all season. Her own read on it afterward was blunt rather than triumphant — she admitted the season had been bumpy and that she’d sometimes been impatient chasing results before her game caught up to her intentions.

On the men’s side, the tournament’s Montreal leg produced a smaller but still meaningful piece of history. Ben Shelton defended his title, becoming the first men’s player to repeat as National Bank Open champion since Rafael Nadal in 2019. He did it without dropping a set the entire week and closed out the final striking the ball at 230 kilometres per hour without surrendering a single break-point chance, in a match that lasted just one hour twenty-seven minutes against fellow American Brandon Nakashima. Full men’s draw results are on the ATP Tour site.

The Withdrawal That Set Up the Djokovic Cincinnati Health Scare

Montreal was always going to be diminished at the top. Back on July 24, World No. 1 Jannik Sinner and 24-time Grand Slam champion Novak Djokovic both withdrew from the National Bank Open, a decision both players attributed to workload management amid a hectic schedule, prioritizing their health ahead of the US Open. Carlos Alcaraz was already off the entry list entirely, still recovering from a right wrist injury that had forced him to miss the French Open and Wimbledon. Tournament director Valerie Tetreault didn’t hide her frustration, noting the event was disappointed to lose both men especially after they’d also skipped last year’s tournament in Toronto.

That withdrawal reads differently in hindsight. Djokovic wasn’t managing a minor niggle to peak for Cincinnati and New York — he was managing something that would catch up with him within three weeks anyway.

The Djokovic Cincinnati Health Scare, Explained

Djokovic arrived in Ohio returning to the Cincinnati Open for the first time in three years, looking to take advantage of the absences of Alcaraz and Sinner, and on paper the draw broke kindly for him. It didn’t play out that way.

He survived round one the hard way, needing three tiebreaks to get past Britain’s Jan Choinski, 7-6(9), 6-7(7), 7-6(4). Round two against Argentina’s Thiago Agustin Tirante, ranked outside the top 60, was supposed to be more straightforward. Instead, it turned into the Djokovic Cincinnati health scare that will define this stretch of his season. Djokovic appeared to vomit during a changeover in the second set, at 6-2, 2-2, before taking a medical timeout and playing on. Tirante seized the opening, breaking to level the second set before closing it out and carrying momentum into a tight decider, winning 2-6, 6-4, 6-4 — the biggest win of his career, arriving the same week he cracked the top 50 for the first time.

The context makes the result more than just an early exit. Djokovic had gone 355-13 — a 96.5 percent clip — after winning the first set at Masters 1000 level across two decades, from 2005 to 2025. Tirante became just the 14th man ever to beat him from that position, and only the second ranked outside the top 30 to do it at this event, after Argentina’s Diego Serra in 2006. Draw and results are available on the official Cincinnati Open site.

What he said afterward mattered more than the scoreline. Speaking to Serbian outlet Sportklub, Djokovic said a years-long health problem — not just the heat — was behind the collapse, describing it as something that’s bothered him for several years and flares badly in high humidity. Temperatures had reached 28 degrees Celsius with 80 percent humidity that Saturday, and he acknowledged the conditions compounded something already working against him, along with the ordinary pressure of competing. Most striking was his closing note: a three-time champion in Cincinnati who arrived on a 10-match winning streak at the tournament said he now considers it more likely than not that this was his last visit. That’s not the language of a man managing a bad day. It’s the language of someone doing the arithmetic on how many more of these he has left.

Cincinnati’s Opening Days Beyond Djokovic

The rest of the draw offered its own threads worth pulling on before the second week.

The contenders are stacked. The entire top 10 and 75 of the top 77 players on the WTA Tour are in the field, headlined by World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka and defending champion Iga Swiatek, with five past champions and ten Grand Slam winners total in the draw. Naomi Osaka’s late withdrawal reshuffled the bottom half, and Sabalenka — coming off a fourth-round Toronto exit — is projected into a quarterfinal with Elina Svitolina, who arrives fresh off a deep Toronto run of her own.

The men’s field is missing its two biggest names. Wimbledon champion Sinner and Australian Open champion Alcaraz are both out, citing knee and wrist injuries respectively, leaving Taylor Fritz and Ben Shelton as the home favorites to lift the trophy.

There were quieter statement wins. Lorenzo Musetti opened untroubled, and Daniil Medvedev picked up a personal milestone, beating Marco Trungelliti 6-4, 7-5 for his 100th career Masters 1000 hard-court win under new coach Golubev. Felix Auger-Aliassime, playing his first match since Wimbledon, survived a windy finish to beat Stefanos Tsitsipas for his first win over the Greek in four years — a small measure of momentum for the Canadian heading into New York. The full WTA Cincinnati draw breakdown is here.

None of it will be remembered the way the Djokovic Cincinnati health scare is remembered. But it’s the backdrop against which his week has to be read: a tour that keeps moving, with or without its biggest names, toward a US Open that suddenly looks a lot more open than it did a month ago.