Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori retain U.S. Open mixed doubles by outclassing singles stars

It wasn’t the way the higher minds of American tennis drew it up when they set out on their mission to make mixed doubles a thing.

They had their hearts set on a star-studded showdown, with singles champions like Carlos Alcaraz and Coco Gauff on one side of the net and Jannik Sinner and Naomi Osaka on the other.

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They got half of what they bargained for Wednesday night in the finals of this little tennis experiment in what happens when celebrity, singles stardom, a Grand Slam title and a $1 million payday are put into a beaker. Or maybe 40 percent, given six-time Grand Slam singles champion Iga Świątek played for a title with then-three-time singles finalist Casper Ruud.

Their opponents, defending champs Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori, who are actual doubles players, delivered a different sort of script. And maybe it wasn’t as sexy as a showdown of boldface names under the New York lights in a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium. But as sports experiments go, it ended up being one of the more captivating things that tennis has seen in a while.

Here, in front of 24,000 fans making some big noise, tennis got an answer to one of its age-old questions: What happens when you put a team of doubles experts, who don’t get this kind of limelight all that often, against a couple of the best singles players of their generation?

And when it was over, after two days of competition, four matches, seven dominant sets, one strange collapse, the most dramatic of finishes and too many exclamation-point volleys from the condor-like Vavassori to count, tennis had its answer.

It was pretty emphatic. Doubles was victorious, with Errani and Vavassori beating Świątek and Ruud 6-3, 5-7, 10-6 in the final.

In the deciding tiebreak, having frittered away an earlier chance to serve out the match, Vavassori cranked serves and crushed overheads with primal grunts. He jumped each time he and Errani grabbed a point and sprinted to slap her hand before the next serve.

A point from the title, Errani hit an underarm second serve, a bizarre move she’d done on her way to the gold medal at the Paris Olympics. It didn’t work this time, but on the next point, Vavassori rolled a forehand at Świątek’s feet, and the dominant women’s player of the past three years couldn’t lift the ball over the net.

The Italians dropped their rackets, and a moment later, Vavassori was lifting Errani into the air.

The moment of victory! pic.twitter.com/1ePUYDa4B6 — US Open Tennis (@usopen) August 21, 2025

The past 72 hours for Świątek have been busy, and she isn’t done yet. She won the Cincinnati Open on Monday night, landed after midnight, powered her team through the morning session Tuesday into the semifinals and fought through two match-deciding tiebreaks to near-midnight Wednesday. Her singles campaign starts as soon as Sunday. “We had a good time. Time for us to focus on singles,” Ruud said during the trophy ceremony.

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“We saw today that doubles is a great product,” Vavassori said.

“Andrea, you are too strong,” Errani said, before turning to the stands. “Thanks for the crowd. Playing in front of you, it was amazing.

“This one is also for the doubles players who couldn’t play this tournament. This one is for them.”

Smarter tennis minds can debate long into the night whether it was an upset. The bottom line was this: The party crashers, just the sort of players the U.S. Open’s new mixed doubles format had mostly wanted to do away with, were lifting the trophy and splitting one of the biggest winners’ checks of their careers.

When it counted most, Świątek, who barely loses tennis matches these days, couldn’t hold her serve. Ruud, with one of the best forehands in the game, kept shanking forehand returns of Errani’s 70 mph serves off the court or into the net.

Score one for tennis IQ, for savvy over sublime athleticism, for a couple of players on a mission to prove their value and that of their doubles comrades to the rest of the sport.

And yet, all of that was probably subtext. Because Wednesday might very well go down as the night that spelled the end of mixed doubles as big-time tennis has known it.

Maybe other tournaments will keep running out all those high-quality, talented individuals who kept at the game they love in the only form that allowed them to scratch out a living.

More likely, they will look at the spectacle the U.S. Open put on, the one that packed the biggest stadium in tennis for a show that had big-name DJs blasting dance music to a rollicking crowd that was here for all of it and wonder how they might get themselves some of that. Or rather, how they can at least try.

All it took was some money — likely more than $2.5 million in prize money and other expenses for the players. Some arm-twisting to get the big stars to sign up and buy in. And that magic mix of celebrity, competition and entertainment, in which the U.S. Open has long specialized.

The intrigue of four months of tennis matchmaking in the lead-up didn’t hurt, either. Put that all together, and even mixed doubles, the neglected stepchild of the sport, can become a hit. Errani, Vavassori and their compatriots can point to the most intriguing element being the battle of the disciplines. Some more of that and some more of them and this tournament might go to another, even better and more equitable level.

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Because love it or hate it — and all the doubles players who were cut out of the action and the purists and traditionalists really did hate it — this week, on these two days, and especially Wednesday night, this was a pretty big hit. Like a lot of nights at the U.S. Open, it went on a little long and a little late.

But in the final games, Ashe was still something like three-quarters full. The fans got a show, with a surprise ending — or maybe it wasn’t all that surprising at all.

(Photo: Elsa / Getty Images

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