The 2023 US Open mixed doubles final is set. The last time an all-American mixed doubles team hoisted the championship cup was in 2011, when Jack Sock and Melanie Oudin took the title.
This year, Jessica Pegula and Austin Krajicek could end the drought, but to do so, they will have to beat two players who randomly teamed up in the referee’s room a little more than a week ago: Harri Heliovaara of Finland and Anna Danilina of Kazakhstan.
“I’d never even seen her before this,” Heliovaara, 34, admitted. “We were at the sign-in at the same time and said, ‘Who are you? Are you looking for a partner?’ She was! And here we go. Final.”
In a one-on-one interview on Wednesday, they were still learning about each other shortly after a semifinal in which they beat against Japan’s Ena Shibahara (who had won the 2022 Roland Garros mixed title) and Mate Pavic of Croatia (who had won three majors with different mixed partners, including the 2016 US Open).
When Danilina, 28, was asked about her University of Florida career that included the 2017 NCAA team title and 2018 MVP award before graduating with an economics degree, Heliovara said, “I didn’t know any of this.”
Similarly, when Heliovaara elaborated on his four years of retirement (from 2013 to 2017), his partner had no idea that he got his master’s degree in industrial engineering management, worked for McKinsey as a consultant and had a baby earlier this year.
The team was so fresh that on August 30, the day of their first match, Heliovaara had played men’s doubles earlier in the day, so Danilina warmed up without him and said, “Ten minutes before going on the court, we asked, ‘Which side are you playing on?’ Let’s do this!”
They were speaking while the other semifinal match was underway. In it, four Americans were vying for the final berth but Danilina said it didn’t particularly matter which U.S. team would be on the other side of the net when they all play for the $170,000 winners’ check—not even “my former Gator, Ben [Shelton]. He came [to the University of Florida] after I graduated, but I know him very, very well. He was always there because his dad was head coach on the men’s side, so that would be fun.”
But that’s not going to happen. Not this year.
Shelton and his American mixed doubles partner, Taylor Townsend, came quite close, but lost the decisive 10-point tiebreak after splitting the first two sets against Pegula, 29, and Krajicek, 33.
Pegula and Krajicek have a much longer history compared to their international opponents in the final. They met as US teammates at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and have competed together at most of the majors ever since, beginning with the 2021 US Open. This year at Flushing Meadows, they won three of their four matches in 10-point tie breaks to reach their first major final as a team.
Worth noting: Pegula was doing triple-duty here. She reached the fourth round in women’s singles and made the quarterfinals in women’s doubles with Coco Gauff—but they lost that match about two hours before Pegula’s mixed doubles semifinal.
After she and Krajicek prevailed, Pegula said after playing a personal total of 3 hours and 35 minutes on a long 95-degree day, “It’s nice to make the final in one of three events.”
Later, in a small interview room, both Pegula and Krajicek seemed confident about their chances of winning.
But it’s anyone’s game.
As an ebullient Danilina said earlier with a grin: “The pressure will be on them, probably since the Americans haven’t won for a while.”
