Jodar goes out without earning a single break point, to Bu, a lucky loser ranked No. 124 !
Rafael Jodar’s first US Open ended without a contest. The No. 12 seed lost 6-2, 6-1, 6-1, won four games and never earned a break point. Bu Yunchaokete, a lucky loser ranked No. 124 who had never won a match at a major, becomes the fourth Chinese man to win one in the Open Era.
Rafael Jodar, 2026 | © © Wally Nell/ZUMA Press Wire
Rafael Jodar arrived at his first US Open as the highest-seeded man to make a main-draw debut here since Stefanos Tsitsipas in 2018, having climbed from No. 168 in the world to No. 11 in eight months. On Wednesday evening he was beaten 6-2, 6-1, 6-1 by a lucky loser who had never won a Grand Slam match, and he did not earn a break point in the entire match. Rafa Jodar becomes the highest seeded player in US Open history to lose to a lucky loser in the Open Era.
Bu plays the winner between Hungarian Fabian Marozsan and American wild card Michael Zheng.
Bu Yunchaokete held all 11 of his service games and faced nothing. Jodar won four of his own, was broken seven times from the 16 break points he conceded, and took 51 of the 140 points played. He made 36 unforced errors to 21, landed 52% of his first serves, and won 12 of the 38 points on his second. Bu won 87% of the points behind his own first serve and 85% of his points at the net. In other words: no tennis match was played.
The one thing Jodar did do was survive a match point, when Bu double-faulted on the first of them. It bought him two more points.
A first Grand Slam win, and only the fourth by a Chinese man
Bu, 24, was in the draw only because Thanasi Kokkinakis withdrew with an ankle injury. He came in 0-6 in Grand Slam main draws, six first-round losses, and 0-2 on tour this season, without a tour-level win since beating Juan Manuel Cerundolo in the first round at Shanghai last October. His career high was No. 64, in April 2025.
He becomes the fourth Chinese man to win a Grand Slam match in the Open Era, after Zhang Ze, Shang Juncheng and Wu Yibing, who is himself through to the second round of this tournament. It is also Bu’s first win over a top-20 player in two years. The previous two came in the same week, over Lorenzo Musetti and Andrey Rublev, on his run to the Beijing semi-finals in 2024.
What Jodar had done to get here
The scale of the upset is in the season the 19-year-old was having. Since July he was 10-3 on North American hard courts, with a final in Washington, that Montreal semi-final and the fourth round in Cincinnati.
A win would have made him the eighth teenager this century to reach the second round of all four majors in one season, after Nadal, Marin Cilic, Juan Martin del Potro, Denis Shapovalov, Alcaraz, Joao Fonseca and Jakub Mensik.
The summer’s form players keep going out
It is the third time in four days that a man who spent August accumulating hard-court results has left this tournament early, and quickly.
Arthur Fils won the Cincinnati Masters 1000 eleven days before the draw began and lost in the first round to Stefanos Tsitsipas, 4-6, 7-6 (3), 6-1, 6-4, from a set and 5-2 up. Brandon Nakashima, who leads the ATP Tour with 23 hard-court wins this season and reached the Montreal final and the Cincinnati semi-finals, lost 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 to Alex Michelsen in the second round. Now Jodar.
Still are surviving Ben Shelton, the Montreal champion, beat Hubert Hurkacz 6-3, 5-7, 7-6 (3), 7-5 on Wednesday, Taylor Fritz, the Washington champion, and Frances Tiafoe, the Cincinnati runner-up.
