Carlos Alcaraz will have to achieve feat no tennis player has ever done before to win the US Open this year

During the Spaniard’s absence, Alexander Zverev leapfrogged him in the rankings to become the new world number two, but the German has since slipped back into third.

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Alcaraz did not feature at the Canadian Open and has now pulled out of the second ATP Masters 1000 event of the North American hard-court swing in Cincinnati.

If he is to have any chance of winning the US Open, he will have to achieve a feat nobody has ever managed in men’s tennis.

Carlos Alcaraz’s difficult task of winning the 2026 US Open

Since the inception of the ATP Masters 1000 format in 1990, no man has won the US Open singles title without featuring at the Canadian Open and the Cincinnati Open.

A number of players have won the hard-court major without appearing at one of the Masters events, but Alcaraz will have to be the first to do it after skipping both.

The task that awaits Alcaraz is a gigantic one considering how difficult the US Open men’s singles title has been to defend in recent years, regardless of the 23-year-old’s injury setback.

Roger Federer was the last player to go back-to-back in New York, doing so in the 2008 season, 18 years ago.

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Since then, not even Novak Djokovic or Rafael Nadal have been able to hoist the famous trophy two years on the trot.

Alcaraz won the US Open for a second time last year, winning the competition by dropping just one set, which he conceded in the final against Jannik Sinner.

A successful title defence for Alcaraz is beginning to look more and more unlikely, with the main draw of the US Open set to begin in less than a month.

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With Alcaraz not likely to be fully fit by the time the US Open rolls around, Sinner now has another golden opportunity to win a major in 2026.

Sinner took advantage of Alcaraz’s absence at Wimbledon by winning the Championships to secure his fifth Grand Slam title.

If he wins a sixth at the US Open, the Italian will have already won as many majors as both Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg.

He will also be just one Grand Slam crown away from Alcaraz, with the Spaniard having equalled the tallies of John McEnroe and Mats Wilander at the Australian Open earlier this year.