NEW YORK, N.Y. — For the first time in a long while, five American women have made the last 16 of the US Open at the same time, a number the sport has been waiting for with the particular patience of a country that has, at various points, waited for this exact result for roughly a decade.
The five — Coco Gauff, Iva Jovic, Jessica Pegula, Taylor Townsend, and Emma Navarro — advanced over the weekend, with Gauff, the world number four and defending champion, cruising past Cristina Bucsa to reach the fourth round in search of a second title on home soil. The teenager Jovic, ranked 14, won later on Saturday and joined the group, making the number five and, according to every American tennis fan in the building, “finally.”
The draw now means that, for at least the next two rounds, a substantial proportion of the women’s matches will feature at least one American on either side of the net, a statistical reality that has, in the past, usually required a bracket of unusual generosity or a very specific kind of luck. This time, it simply required five good players to be good on a weekend.
The losses, as is always the case, made for their own small drama. Amanda Anisimova, a top-10 American, fell to Anastasia Potapova in straight sets, and Madison Keys was eliminated as well, two results that were received, in the American section of the stands, with a sigh that was, by all accounts, understandable. “We got five,” one fan noted. “We are not going to cry over the two we didn’t get. We got five. That is the number. That is the number now.”
At press time, the fourth-round matches were set to begin, and the American section of Arthur Ashe Stadium had, for the first time in years, the kind of energy that is hard to manufacture and easy to remember.