Mirra Andreeva has beaten the world’s best players on hard courts this season. She has done it at 17. She did it again at 18. But one tournament keeps shutting the door on her: the US Open. The question worth asking right now is whether the 2026 edition at Flushing Meadows finally changes that.
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A US Open Record That Stands Out for the Wrong Reason
Every major Grand Slam tells a different story for Andreeva. At the Australian Open, she has reached the fourth round three consecutive years. At Roland Garros in 2024, she made the semi-finals at 17 years old. At Wimbledon 2025, she reached the quarter-finals without dropping a set until Belinda Bencic.
Then there is New York.
Year | US Open Round | Loss To |
|---|---|---|
2023 | Round 2 | Coco Gauff |
2024 | Round 2 | — |
2025 | Round 3 | Taylor Townsend (No. 139) |
Three appearances. Three early exits. The world No. 7 has never reached the second week at Flushing Meadows, a fact that sits uncomfortably against the rest of her Grand Slam record.
What Actually Happened at the 2025 US Open
The third-round loss to Taylor Townsend in 2025 looked like a shock result on paper. World No. 5 losing to world No. 139 in 76 minutes. But the full picture is more complicated.
Andreeva had injured her left ankle at the Canadian Open weeks earlier and withdrew from Cincinnati entirely. She arrived at the US Open physically compromised. She later confirmed it herself: “I didn’t feel particularly confident in New York.”
The match itself was a tactical mismatch. Townsend attacked the net relentlessly, making 11 approaches in the first set alone and winning 8 of them. Andreeva, by contrast, had just one successful net approach across the entire match. The scoreline was 7-5, 6-2 to Townsend, with Andreeva managing only 6 winners and committing 5 double faults.
On three separate occasions in the second set, Andreeva fell to 0-40 on her own serve. The Arthur Ashe crowd, already firmly behind Townsend following the Jelena Ostapenko controversy two days prior, turned the night session into something Andreeva was completely unprepared for.
The Pattern That Won’t Go Away
The US Open loss was not an isolated incident. After winning back-to-back WTA 1000 titles at Dubai and Indian Wells in early 2025, two of the most impressive weeks of tennis by any teenager in the Open Era, Andreeva went 21-13 for the remainder of the year with zero semi-finals.
The slide included:
- Round 3 exit at the Canadian Open (lost to McCartney Kessler, world No. 58)
- Withdrawal from Cincinnati with the ankle injury
- Round 1 loss at the Ningbo Open to Lin Zhu, ranked world No. 219
Andreeva acknowledged the mental weight of it all during the Asian swing: “After I won those titles, I started to feel more pressure and more expectations. I’m working on being positive, having a good mindset and just trying to enjoy the game.”
Her 2026 season has not fully resolved those concerns either. She won the Adelaide title in January. But at the Australian Open, she committed 33 unforced errors in a 6-2, 4-6 fourth-round loss to Elina Svitolina. At the Doha WTA 1000 in early February, she held a match point at 5-4 in the third set against Victoria Mboko and squandered it with a double fault. She then lost the defending title at Dubai in the quarter-finals to Amanda Anisimova, winning the first set 6-2 before collapsing over the next two.
The double fault in big moments is no longer a one-off. It is a documented trend.
What the Experts Are Saying
Legendary coach Rick Macci, who developed Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova and Andy Roddick, made Andreeva his pick to win the 2025 US Open title before it began. Speaking to Tennis365, he said hard courts suited her movement 20 to 25 percent better than clay, and specifically highlighted her forehand slice as a weapon most coaches overlook.
Former world No. 1 Yevgeny Kafelnikov was far less generous after watching her Australian Open fourth-round loss to Svitolina. Translated from Russian, his assessment was direct: “With the way she’s playing right now, she has no prospects of becoming world No. 1 or winning a Grand Slam. Something has to change.”
Both views are defensible. That tension is what makes a Mirra Andreeva US Open prediction genuinely difficult to call.
The Case For and Against a 2026 Deep Run
Reasons she can go deep:
- Her hard court WTA record is 58-26 (69%), and against top-10 opponents over the past 52 weeks she is 6-2 (75%)
- She is the fourth player since 2000 to record 30+ Grand Slam wins before turning 19, alongside Sharapova, Vaidisova and Gauff
- At 18, she has already beaten both the world No. 1 and No. 2 at the same tournament, a feat only Tracy Austin achieved younger in WTA history
- Coach Conchita Martinez, who won Wimbledon in 1994 and previously worked with Muguruza and Pliskova, has helped Andreeva reach two Grand Slam quarter-finals in one season (Roland Garros and Wimbledon 2025)
Reasons for caution:
- She has never reached the fourth round at the US Open across three attempts
- Double faults under pressure are costing her match points in 2026, not just games
- She lost to the world No. 219 at Ningbo in 2025 during a confidence slump
- Coco Gauff leads their head-to-head 4-0 and is the tournament’s defending runner-up
- She enters 2026 US Open needing to defend title points from both Dubai and Indian Wells, which will add pressure through the hard-court swing
The Verdict
Mirra Andreeva is one of the most gifted teenagers the WTA Tour has produced in years. The Indian Wells and Dubai titles in early 2025 were not flukes. But at Flushing Meadows specifically, she has yet to put together a complete two weeks of tennis when it matters most.
The 2026 US Open will be her fourth appearance. She will arrive seeded, experienced, and with a coach who has guided players to world No. 1. If she can manage her schedule through the hard-court swing without picking up another injury, and if her mental game around pressure points improves between now and August, a quarter-final or beyond is well within reach.
A title run? Andreeva clearly has the ability. Whether Flushing Meadows gets the version of her that dismantled Sabalenka and Swiatek in March 2025, or the version that double-faulted away a match point in Doha in February 2026, will determine everything.
Mirra Andreeva is currently ranked world No. 7 on the WTA Tour. The 2026 US Open takes place August 24 through September 6 at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York.
