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Fritz had been asked whether he had any sympathy for the frustrated doubles specialists who had been brushed aside to make room for the transformation of this event. From his perspective, the right players were in the draw. “I’ve seen a lot of people calling it like an exhibition, or it doesn’t count,” he said. “I think this is the strongest mixed doubles field you’re going to see at a grand slam. If the mixed doubles teams that are in come in and win the event, then I’ll eat my words and say I’m wrong, but I think the level is going to be really high.”
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After six months of anticipation, the revamped US Open mixed‑doubles tournament is finally here.
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Usually the domain of doubles specialists with the exception of the very occasional superstar pairing, mixed doubles rarely generates much fanfare and at the grand slams it has come to represent more opportunities for trophies and prize money for doubles specialists.
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While the event usually runs at the same time as the rest of the grand slam main draws, this year it will be held in the week leading up to the start of the singles main draw.
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Sixteen teams will compete in a knockout draw across Tuesday and Wednesday. The first three rounds will be decided in abbreviated four‑game sets while the final will be determined in standard six-game sets. The winners will take home $1m between them, an $800,000 increase on last year. In an era when the top players have largely spurned doubles because of the increased physical demands of singles competition, the ultimate aim of the event is to attract the stars.
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View image in fullscreen Reigning champions Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori are the only doubles specialists in the draw. Photograph: Julia Nikhinson/AP
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For that reason, officials at the United States Tennis Association (USTA) already feel like the glittering player field and the interest it has generated has justified the move. The partnership between Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu has created countless headlines, but other distinguished entrants include Novak Djokovic and his compatriot Olga Danilovic, Iga Swiatek with Casper Ruud, and Fritz alongside Elena Rybakina. The only doubles specialist team are the Italian defending champions, Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori.
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In a truly meaningful event, the players would be scrambling for the most advantageous pairings. Since the initial entry list, numerous withdrawals have followed. Navarro’s withdrawal actually led Sinner to possibly find an even better partner in Katerina Siniakova, an 11-time grand slam champion. Jack Draper, meanwhile, is now on his third partner, Jessica Pegula, after his previous partners, Zheng Qinwen and Paula Badosa, withdrew from the US Open.
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Despite how much it has changed, the draw makes for surreal viewing with so many prominent singles players present. The first two lines are particularly noteworthy: Alcaraz and Raducanu have been drawn against the top seeds, Draper and Pegula, meaning the British No 1s are scheduled to do battle on Tuesday afternoon.
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Over the past few months on the tour, mixed doubles at the US Open has been a popular subject in player lounges at tournaments. Madison Keys, who is paired with Frances Tiafoe, says she has received FaceTime calls from Tiafoe with questions about their partnership, such as on which side she would prefer to play.
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Even on the eve of the tournament, there is still serious doubt surrounding the participation of some of the most prominent players in the draw. Alcaraz and Swiatek were competing in Cincinnati less than 24 hours before their first‑round mixed doubles matches in New York, meaning they will have an extremely short turnaround after a gruelling two-week event. Alternates should be ready.
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Quick Guide Edmund announces retirement Show The former British No 1 Kyle Edmund has announced his retirement from tennis at the age of 30. Edmund won two ATP titles and became only the second British man after Sir Andy Murray to reach the semi-finals of the Australian Open in 2018. He was part of the Great Britain team that won the Davis Cup for the first time in 79 years, and also represented his country at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Unfortunately, Edmund’s ascent into the world’s top 50 corresponded with a knee injury that required three operations and kept him off the tour for almost two years. In a statement issued by the LTA, Edmund said: “The last five years have taken a toll with three surgeries and other injuries [and] my body is telling me it’s finally reached the end point. Looking back I can say I tried my absolute best in my career and my hardest to get back to where I was. There are no regrets whatsoever.” Edmund, who defeated Novak Djokovic at the ATP Masters in 2018, made progress in his latest comeback attempt but decided the Nottingham Challenger final defeat against Jack Pinnington Jones last month would be his last match. He said on social media: “Of course to beat Novak, probably the greatest player of all time, was a great feeling and probably the biggest scalp of my career. I spent four or five years trying to come back and was never fully able to reach my goal. But over the next few weeks and months it will be a nice time to reflect and spend more time with my family and appreciate the journey.” PA Media Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback.
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The excitement from many of the singles players is counterbalanced by disappointment from doubles specialists who feel they have been pushed out of the event. Singles rankings determine the entry list so they did not come close to making the cut. “When two world No 1s in doubles don’t get into the tournament, there’s probably nothing more to say about it,” Siniakova said on Canal+.
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Ben Shelton, who is paired with the No 1 doubles player Taylor Townsend, is empathetic towards the doubles players’ frustrations. Shelton says: “I totally understand the honour of playing mixed doubles and what a mixed doubles title means, especially to those guys and girls, and I feel for them that they’re not able to play this year. At the same time, I understand the business mind of the US Open and what they’re trying to do to generate more revenue, make their event more profitable and have more excitement around it. That’s the craziest lineup that you’ve seen at mixed doubles in your life.”
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A longtime member of the Women’s Tennis Association’s player council, Pegula questions the US Open’s decision to make such a significant change without properly consulting the players, a common complaint. Communication with players, she believes, could have actually addressed some of these problems. “I felt like that was a really good example where we were like: ‘OK, you guys just kind of went rogue and changed the whole entire format and didn’t tell anybody, and you just kind of did it.’ And it was kind of like: ‘Did you talk to the players? Did you get input, maybe on how it could have been better?’”
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In the same breath, though, Pegula has expressed her excitement for the tournament ahead.
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This will not be the defining moment of any of these players’ careers, but they are intensely competitive beings who step on to the tennis court every day with the intention of winning, regardless of the format. For at least 30 minutes of their lives, this event will be a priority for many.
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Keys said: “I mean, there’s a grand slam trophy on the line and have you seen the prize money? I’m gonna try real hard.”
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A group of colossal black tombstones has landed on the north bank of the Thames in London, looking like mysterious monoliths from another civilisation. They stand near Blackfriars Bridge as imposing bookends, rising almost 10 metres, folded in places to form platforms and benches, slipping down in others to become one with the pavement. Water trickles from the summit of one huge slab, running down ridges and splashing into a sunken pool. Another pair rise straight out of the river wall, hoisting wooden fenders with them from the swirling brown waters below.
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“I wanted to make something that comes from nowhere,” says Scottish artist Nathan Coley, as he clambers on to one of his concrete blocks, which form part of the most prominent new public artwork in Britain’s capital, set to be unveiled next month. “They are chunky, abstract, brooding objects that don’t reference anyone or anything. They can be joyful, beautiful and brutal at the same time.”
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I was asked if I could make the sewer chimneys resemble trees, like they do with phone masts
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Coley is better known for his big illuminated signs, but there may be a good reason he didn’t want his sculptures to reference their subject this time. His slabs are the most visible part of the Tideway project, London’s £4.6bn super sewer, built to prevent 18m tonnes of sewage overflowing into the river each year. These enigmatic structures are, in effect, memorials to the era of flushing fecal matter straight into the Thames. “The thing about the super sewer,” Coley says, “is that it’s all hidden. So no one knows where they’re spending all this money. I wanted to make something really exciting to celebrate it.”
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View image in fullscreen ‘Chunky, abstract, brooding’ … one of Nathan Coley’s Stages on Bazalgette Embankment. Photograph: Chris Hopkinson
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There has been much talk of Tideway’s spiralling budget and endless delays, its questionable usefulness, and its boss’s pay. But little attention has been given to the fact that a consequence of this costly pipe is a series of new, truly public spaces on the river, for the first time in a generation.
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One of the seven spaces created as a happy byproduct of the sewer is the 250-metre long stretch where we’re standing: a broad granite expanse dotted with trees, benches and Coley’s black slabs.
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From Putney in the west to Deptford in the east, Tideway’s meandering 25km path has necessitated the construction of new bits of land, poking out into the Thames to connect the existing overflow sewers (or “lost rivers” to the romantically inclined) to the new tunnel below. Totalling more than three acres, the spaces vary in size according to the volume of waste that must be intercepted and sent whooshing on its way in a spiralling vortex down huge new drop shafts – all of which happens beneath the neatly paved plazas.
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“They are essentially giant manhole covers,” says Roger Hawkins of Hawkins\Brown, the architects responsible for the five central spaces, from Chelsea Embankment to Blackfriars, that together make up the size of Trafalgar Square. “In an ideal world for the engineers, they would be fenced-off compounds that they could easily access. But instead, Tideway decided to create new public spaces, in just the same way that the original embankments were given back to the public in return for the disruption that was caused.”
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Before Joseph Bazalgette built the Victorian network of sewers in the 1860s, London met the Thames with a muddy, sewage-soaked foreshore. The construction of the sewers led to the creation of the embankments: great brick and stone feats of engineering that introduced stately, tree-lined riverside promenades for the first time. Stroll along Victoria Embankment today and you will find the original cast-iron benches held up by sphinxes and camels, lamp-posts supported by entwined dolphins, and ornate sewer ventilation chimneys, or “stink pipes”, in the form of stylised doric columns. So how do Tideway’s contemporary equivalents compare?
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View image in fullscreen Softened edge … Chelsea Quay, which will become part-flooded during high tide. Photograph: Rob Parrish
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The separation of architecture and engineering in the ensuing 160 years, along with the rise of bureaucratic procurement systems, has led to somewhat more fragmented results. “Tideway was a totally engineering-led project,” says a member of the team who has worked on it for the last decade. “When you’re sitting in meetings with a couple of hundred civil engineers, they see the architecture and landscape as a kind of fluff on top.”
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Accordingly, the results feel less tied together by a unifying Bazalgettian hand than pieced together by committees with catalogues – something one artist involved describes as “Screwfixation”. Service and inspection requirements mean the pavements have become hymns to the manhole cover, peppered with innumerable service hatches for sewer buggies, drones and probes. One site features 55 hatches in an area half the size of a tennis court. The spaces are not all yet fully complete and open, but they have the slight sense of engineering that has been tiled with a coating of architecture, and garnished with public art.
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View image in fullscreen Super structure … a civil engineer inside the concrete tunnel, during construction of the Tideway project. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images
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Still, there are some striking flourishes. One of the most consistent, recognisable elements, which help give the project a kind of site-wide identity, are the distinctive black cast-iron ventilation shafts. These modern-day stink pipes look like the funnels of submerged ships, twisting and flaring out as they rise to five metres, their form mimicking the path of the plummeting sewage vortex.
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“At one point, I was asked if I could make them look like trees, in the way they disguise mobile phone masts,” says Clare Donnelly, Tideway’s lead architect at Fereday Pollard, the firm in charge of coordinating the foreshore structures. “You don’t want to scream ‘sewer pipe’ at people, but we wanted them to be confident features in the landscape, not trying to hide.” Softening their heft, the funnels are inscribed with gnomic lines of poetry by Dorothea Smartt, alluding to the various lost rivers being intercepted below the pavement. “The furious Fleet flows red with Roman blood,” declares a chimney at Blackfriars. “Boudica battles bravely.”
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There are other contextual nods. At Chelsea, in front of the Royal hospital, the brick river wall has been extended out in a sinuous sweep to form a swelling, brick-paved space defined by stepped seating, incorporating colourful stripes of glazed bricks by artist Florian Roithmayr. You enter through a gap in Bazalgette’s original river wall, which has been radically sliced open, with the cut granite left pleasingly raw.
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View image in fullscreen Row your boat … a sculpture marks the start point of the boat race at the new Putney Embankment. Photograph: Stewart Turkington
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“We were thinking about the alluvial geology of the river,” says Marko Neskovic, partner at Hawkins\Brown, “imagining the beach popping up and allowing you to walk on it, as if it was an eroding island.” The wall rises from the river in banded strata, stepping back as it climbs to form little planted intertidal terraces, with grooves for aquatic life to shelter. A tempting staircase leads down to the water, although it is sadly fenced off. The architects had hoped they could provide access to the beach for mudlarkers, but the Port of London authority (controller of the Thames) vetoed the idea on safety grounds. Officially, the steps are therefore an escape route, rather than an access point.
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Despite the guidance to treat the river as foe, the architects have tried where they can to soften the relationship with the water. Most of the spaces slope subtly up towards the flood defence line, so you can see the Thames more easily rather than it being blocked behind the river wall. A foot-wetting frisson can also be had thanks to the incorporation of “floodable terraces”, which get splashed when big boats pass at high tide. Elsewhere, great iron mooring rings, grasped between lions’ teeth, are now surreally marooned inland, giving you a sense of transgressing beyond the river wall.
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View image in fullscreen ‘A workingman’s cushion’ … Richard Wentworth’s cast bronze sandbag. Photograph: Courtesy the artist
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While Chelsea opts for organic curving brick, the space at Victoria Embankment, known as Tyburn Quay, is a more sober granite plaza raised on a square plinth, reflecting the formal surrounds of Westminster. A faintly Miesian pavilion will house kiosks for a cafe and loos, its stone walls inscribed with the profile of Bazalgette’s sewer, while an inlaid ring of bronze in the ground marks the location of the gigantic drop shaft below the paving. “We tried to incorporate lots of things you could enjoy if you were a river buff,” says Hawkins\Brown’s Fiona Stewart. “Like using ductile iron in the paving at Blackfriars, to reference the iron deposits at the source of the Fleet.” Budding psychogeographers will rejoice.
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The artist commissions bring further intrigue, from a forthcoming flotilla of trading vessels by Hew Locke in Tower Hamlets, to playful plinths by Studio Weave in Deptford, to Claire Barclay’s cast bronze oar balustrades in Putney, marking the starting point of the University Boat Race. Tyburn Quay’s grey granite decorum has been cheekily disrupted by Richard Wentworth, who has installed a series of cast bronze sandbags, which droop in haphazard piles over the stone steps, alluding to makeshift flood defences. “It’s a workingman’s cushion,” says Wentworth, who has long celebrated the national culture of make-do-and-mend. “I hope the sandbags will get shiny where people sit on them. And they’re a little bit erotic. You can feel that someone might propose here.”
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His saucy sacks are under wraps until the space opens later this year, but the texture of the hessian has been meticulously recreated in bronze by the Lockbund sculpture foundry in Oxfordshire, which is also producing his bronze benches for Albert Embankment, near the MI6 headquarters. In an allusion to the Vauxhall origins of sanitaryware manufacturer Royal Doulton, Wentworth has designed seating in the form of conjoined loos. “I think there’s something nice about sitting on the toilet with lots of other people,” he says. “It reminds you that pooing is public.”
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Were you a young woman in the 90s or 00s? If so, you (and me!) really ought to be entitled to compensation. We may not have had to deal with social media influencers giving their Labubus butt implants (this is a thing now), but it was a toxic time to be a woman. British tabloids were full of topless Page 3 girls, and we were fed a steady diet of body-shaming magazines, heroin-chic fashion and the idea that Bridget Jones, who weighed only 62kg (9st 10lb), was disgustingly fat.
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If you’ve forgotten how awful things were, just look online: reminders keep going viral. Last week, for example, clips of shock jock Howard Stern’s infamous 2000s “Buttaface Competition” started circulating on social media. This was a contest to find the “best” body and “ugliest” face, which involved women parading around in bikinis with paper bags on their heads. In one clip the crowd starts mock retching as a very conventionally attractive woman takes the bag off her head. I don’t know where that woman is now, but I hope she is living her best life.
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Another recently viral memento from the bad old days: an 18-year-old article from the lad mag Maxim, listing the “Unsexiest Women Alive”. Sarah Jessica Parker, labelled a “Barbaro-faced broad”, was described as the “least sexy woman in a group of very unsexy women” by the 2007 list. Parker was quite understandably upset by this, later saying: “It’s condemnation, it’s insane. What can I do?”
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The Maxim piece, which has been scrubbed from the internet, also took aim at Britney Spears, saying she had “lost the ability to perform, but gained … about 23 pounds of Funyun pudge”. While cruel, that sort of commentary was not unusual: it’s really no wonder that Spears, sexualised and picked apart her entire life, had a breakdown in 2008. In a memoir that came out in 2023, Spears wrote that shaving her head in 2007 and acting out were her ways of “pushing back”.
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Spears isn’t the only star who has spoken out about the way she was treated by journalists back in the day. Last year, Kate Winslet broke down during a TV interview when she discussed being body-shamed as a 22-year-old actor during the Titanic era. Winslet was bullied relentlessly: the Titanic director James Cameron reportedly nicknamed the actor “Kate Weighs-a-Lot” and the late comedian Joan Rivers, a real piece of work, joked: “If Kate Winslet had dropped a few pounds, the Titanic would never have sunk.” Rivers had form on the body-shaming front: she also once wagged her finger at Oprah Winfrey and instructed her to lose 15 pounds.
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Now it seems Victoria Beckham is to speak out about the scrutiny of her body during her Spice Girls era in an upcoming Netflix docuseries. “When you look back in hindsight at the media environment in the 90s, it was super hard,” an industry insider told Page Six of the series, which comes out next month. Sources also told the outlet that the documentary “looks back on archival footage including when TV presenter Chris Evans pushed [Victoria] to be weighed live on air in 1999 – just two months after she gave birth to Brooklyn”. (His verdict after she got on the scales: “Not bad at all.”)
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“Can you imagine doing that nowadays?” Beckham asked Vogue Australia in 2022, about that televised post-partum weigh-in. Not really, no. A quarter of a century after that Evans stunt, there isn’t as much overt body shaming on mainstream media as there used to be. But that doesn’t mean that things have drastically changed for the better. Nor does it mean, as Beckham said in 2022 to Grazia, that being thin is “old-fashioned”.
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On the contrary, while we had about a decade of body positivity in the 2010s, it feels as though we’re now regressing. Plastic surgery has become scarily normalised, with young women getting their buccal fat removed for a more gaunt look. We’re also, of course, in the age of Ozempic. The boom in GLP-1s is helping to bring extreme thinness back in vogue and has ushered in what one Guardian writer recently described as “shrinking girl summer”. Except this time around, what’s aspirational isn’t the heroin chic figures of the 90s, it’s a thin but perfectly toned ‘pilates princess’ body. It doesn’t matter what the trend is – policing women’s bodies never seems to go out of fashion.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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