Zheng Qinwen Returns to Form at US Open After Surgery

Zheng Qinwen dropped flat on the hard court, then sprang back up, fist clenched, eyes blazing. It wasn’t just a celebration. It was a release.

The 2024 Olympic champion is back in the third round of the US Open, and more importantly, she feels like herself again.

From surgery table to qualifying grind

Twelve months ago, Zheng was a fixture at the top of the game, a former world No. 4 who treated winning as routine. Then came elbow surgery, a longer-than-expected recovery, and a 2025 season that never seemed to start.

She missed the Australian Open. The results that followed were patchy. The confidence, even more fragile.

“Before the surgery, for me winning is like drinking water -- everything comes natural, everything comes fluent,” she said after a gritty 6-4, 2-6, 6-1 win over Yulia Putintseva on Thursday.

After the operation, that ease vanished. She ran into the best players, pushed them, but couldn’t finish them off.

“After my surgery, I had some tough matches against the best players in the world (and) I'm close but I don't get them,” she admitted. “I totally lost the dynamic of how to compete.”

The ranking told the same story. Zheng slid so far she found herself staring at a number she never expected to see next to her name: 125. That meant qualifying. No guarantees, no comforts, no big stages. Just a scrap for survival.

“It takes a while for me to accept my ranking dropped to 125 and, OK, I need to actually play qualies,” she said.

She didn’t like it. But she did it.

Fire rekindled in New York

Somewhere in that grind, the competitor came back.

“Now after two, three months I really felt the first time in this tournament I find myself, I found my fire back during the competition,” Zheng said.

The match against Putintseva underlined it. The scoreline swung sharply: Zheng edged the first set, lost her way in the second, then stormed through the third. The kind of stop-start performance that can break a player still searching for belief.

Instead, she embraced the fight. By the time she sealed the deciding set 6-1, her reaction told its own story. This was about more than a place in the third round. It was proof that the instincts she feared were gone had only been hiding.

A big-stage test against Keys

Now comes a step up in every sense. Zheng will face former Australian Open champion Madison Keys for a place in the last 16, a match that should bring her back to the main show courts of Flushing Meadows after two rounds on the outer ones.

“I used to always play on the big court,” she said. “I need to fight to get everything back.”

The ranking, the aura, the big arenas under the lights — Zheng knows none of it will be handed to her this time. But for the first time since that surgery, she walks into a marquee match not as a story of what she used to be, but as a threat again.

The qualifiers are behind her. The fire is not.