WHAT HAPPENED: New Yorkers, wake up and smell the roses: Jessica Pegula is still rolling at the 2024 US Open.
In a battle of the Jessicas in a cloudy third-round match Saturday, young Spaniard Jessica Bouzas Maneiro had no answers for the American. Pegula triumphed, 6-3, 6-3, in front of an Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd that was hanging on her every move.
After weathering a slow start to this year’s Slam circuit, the buzz around Pegula’s season has loudened to a roar. The Buffalo, N.Y., native rolled into Queens off of a successful title defense in Toronto and a run to the final in Cincinnati, both in August, before capping off the month with today’s convincing victory. In between, she made quick work of fellow Americans Shelby Rogers and Sofia Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champ, in the first and second rounds in Flushing. Talk about a month to remember.
Today’s contest started off evenly. Neither woman could break away until the sixth-seeded Pegula did just that, cracking Bouzas Maneiro in the seventh game to escape their 3-3 standstill and start covering ground. After that inaugural break, the American quickly found her groove, not giving up another game to wrap up the first set, 6-3. (Most of the games were not close affairs: Pegula lost only two points on serve.)
Bouzas Maneiro opened the second set with renewed vigor, staying in lockstep with Pegula for the first six games—long enough to pose a threat. She again couldn’t hang on, however, as Pegula leaned into her momentum for another 6-3 set, nabbing the match in a brisk 70 minutes.
“I think I just played solid,” said Pegula on court after the match. “I didn’t do anything crazy and I didn’t do anything bad.”
“I felt like I was able to execute my strategy and figure things out and get it done pretty quickly,” she added later.
WHAT IT MEANS: This fourth-round run equals her run in New York last year. Overall, Pegula has reached Slam quarterfinals six times, including one last-eight appearance at the US Open, back in 2022.
Up next for Pegula will be No. 18 Diana Shnaider, a 20 year-old in the midst of a season that’s seen her beat Coco Gauff and playing in her first US Open main draw. The two have met once before—a semifinal matchup in Toronto a few weeks ago, which Pegula won in straight sets en route to the title.
“She’s been super match-tough this year. Had a lot of good wins,” Pegula said of Shnaider. “[In the next round] I’m just going to try and use what I did well the last match and hopefully it works, but I think I'm going to have to be ready as well for her to kind of adapt and maybe change a few things from the last time we played.”
If one takes a possible peek into the quarterfinals, however, a bigger challenge could await Pegula: No. 1 Iga Swiatek. If all goes well for the dominant Swiatek, the Pole will be the last player standing between Pegula and the first Grand Slam semifinal of her career, a milestone that she has come tantalizingly close to many times. Swiatek leads their head-to-head, 6-3, but they've split their four most recent meetings, all in 2023.
MATCH POINT: Pegula is a killer on the hard courts. Since the beginning of 2023, only Swiatek has more WTA wins on hard courts than Pegula, with 69 to her 65. Title-wise, five of the American’s six career titles have come on hard court.
