Tennis at the Tokyo Olympics
The Olympic tennis tournament will be missing some of the sport’s bigger names this year, but there’s still plenty of star power to go around in Tokyo. Tennis’s best-known players have often shined at the Olympics — past gold medalists in singles include Steffi Graf, Jennifer Capriati, Venus Williams and Serena Williams on the women’s side, and Andre Agassi, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray on the men’s side.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is the Olympic tennis format?
The men’s and women’s singles medals will be decided by a 64-player, single-elimination tournament. Doubles will feature 32 teams and mixed doubles 16 teams.
All four players or teams to reach the semifinals will compete for medals, with the two semifinal losers playing for bronze and the winners playing for gold (or silver).
Sixteen of the 64 players in singles are seeded based on international rankings, while eight of 32 are seeded in doubles. When possible, no two players from the same country are placed in the same quarter of the draw.
All matches are best-of-three sets. All singles matches will feature a standard tiebreaker (first to seven points) in every set. In doubles, if the teams split the first two sets then the third set will consist entirely of a first-to-10-points tiebreaker.
When is the Olympic tennis tournament?
Olympic tennis begins Friday, June 23, with first-round matches in men’s and women’s singles and men’s and women’s doubles. The complete schedule can be found here. The gold medal matches for each tournament are as follows. All times Eastern.
Men’s doubles: Friday, July 30, 4:30 a.m.
Women’s singles: Saturday, July 31, 5 a.m.
