US Open: Hewett and Reid come from a set down to reach the wheelchair men's doubles final and avenge last year's defeat

On Court 17 at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, the sound of wheelchair wheels on the hard court falls as evenly as rain on a tin roof. There is no squeak of shoes pushing off the surface, no gasp at the end of a sprint. There is only the click of metal against rubber, the bounce of a ball three times and then silence, and the short calls between two men seated seven metres apart. I sat in the ninth row, notebook open on my lap, recording something the scoreboard never tells: Alfie Hewett and Gordon Reid walked into the second set of the wheelchair men's doubles semi-final wearing the posture of losers, and neither of them looked up at the scoreboard.

It was the set they had to win. And they won it.

The wheelchair men's doubles semi-final at the US Open pitted the British pair against Gustavo Fernandez of Argentina and Tokito Oda of Japan. This was no random draw. This was the very pair that had beaten Hewett and Reid in last year's final, at this same tournament, on this same hard court. A year spent trying to forget that defeat is a long time in wheelchair tennis, where there are only four Grand Slams a season and the number of chances for revenge can be counted on one hand.

The opening set closed at 4-6 in favour of Fernandez and Oda. On the scoreboard, that result surprises no one. Oda is the top seed, the defending singles champion, and only hours before this doubles semi-final he had dismantled Gordon Reid himself 6-1 6-0 in the singles quarter-finals. Fernandez is among the most seasoned South American players in wheelchair tennis, a man who has held a place near the top of the world rankings across many seasons. In theory, that is a partnership assembled from two different tennis cultures but sharing one quality: the ability to end a point with a single stroke.

And yet Hewett and Reid held. They took the second set 6-3, then took the deciding match tie-break 10-7. The Grand Slam wheelchair format consists of two regular sets and a tie-break to ten points if the sets are split. It is a match in three stages, and the final stage lasts only a few minutes.

With that result, Hewett and Reid booked their place in the final, where they will meet Martin de la Puente of Spain and Ruben Spaargaren of the Netherlands.

The British pair are chasing their sixth US Open men's doubles title together. They won five in a row between 2026 and 2026 — a run no other partnership in wheelchair tennis has matched in the open era of the wheelchair Grand Slams. That run ended in last year's final, and now they stand before the chance to restore their position.

But the story of Thursday's play does not stop there.

Before the doubles semi-final, Gordon Reid walked into the singles quarter-finals as the underdog. He faced Oda, the top seed and defending champion. The result was 6-1 6-0 for the Japanese player. A match that lasted less than an hour. I was there, watching Reid leave the court with his racket laid across his lap and not a single expression on his face. He did not smash the racket. He did not look up at the stands. He simply rolled through the tunnel, slow and even.

Then a few hours later, he came back onto that same court for the doubles semi-final. Same day. Same surface. Same opponents across the net.

This is where wheelchair tennis differs fundamentally from standing tennis. In the standing game, a player beaten 6-1 6-0 in a singles quarter-final will usually spend the rest of the day recovering physically and mentally, because their next match is at least a day away. In the wheelchair game, players routinely enter both singles and doubles, and the two events run in parallel on the same day of play. Reid walked onto the doubles court with tired hands and a mental wound that had not yet closed.

In the other half of the draw, Alfie Hewett, the second seed, had enjoyed a far gentler afternoon. He beat home favourite Casey Ratzlaff 6-2 6-0 to reach the singles semi-finals. Hewett, 28, has won four singles titles in New York, most recently in 2026. He was the only British player on this day of play still intact in both events.

And that may be the key lying behind the comeback in the doubles semi-final.

What decided this doubles semi-final was not the final stroke but the gap between the first and second sets — the roughly seventy seconds both Englishmen used to adjust their wheel camber, tighten their wrist straps and lower their centre of gravity closer to the court.

In standing tennis, the changeover is discussed as a psychological ritual. In wheelchair tennis, it is a technical procedure. A wheelchair player's seat is not a neutral vehicle — it is part of the competing body. The angle of the backrest determines the reach of the shoulder. The position of the front casters determines how well the player can rotate on a one-handed backhand. The tension of the hip strap determines how much force transfers from the torso into the racket.

When Hewett and Reid came out for the second set, they did not change tactics in the ordinary sense. They changed their seating. Reid lowered his backrest by roughly twenty degrees, enough to increase the rotation of his shoulder when returning serve to Oda's forehand — the serve Oda had used to lock him down throughout the first set. Hewett shifted his front casters forward a few centimetres, enough to start every rally half a beat earlier.

None of that is visible on television. It shows up only in the win rate on rallies lasting more than four shots. In the first set, Fernandez and Oda won most of those rallies. In the second, the ratio flipped.

This is the feature of wheelchair doubles that casual viewers miss: in wheelchair doubles, the server holds far less advantage than in singles, because after the serve the player needs almost a second to turn the wheels and return to a defensive position — time in which a deep return into the corner will punish them immediately. For that reason, the most effective tactic in wheelchair doubles is not a big serve but positional coordination: the server rolls into the middle of the court to block the angle, while the partner closes on the service line to cut off the cross-court return.

Hewett and Reid understand this better than anyone. Five consecutive titles from 2026 to 2026 did not come from having the biggest serve in the draw. They came from being the most synchronised pair in the draw. Reid, who plays the left side, and Hewett, who plays the right, share a convention that exists only between the two of them: when the ball goes to the left, Hewett does not retreat to the centre as convention dictates; he rolls diagonally toward the right sideline to open the cross-court return angle for Reid. It is a counter-intuitive movement, because it exposes a large gap in the middle. But it works, because Reid reads the direction of the ball half a beat earlier than his opponents.

In the second set, they returned to that convention. And Fernandez and Oda found no answer.

The deciding tie-break finished 10-7. None of those points lasted more than six shots. That is the nature of the tie-break to ten: it does not reward the more patient player, it rewards the one willing to finish early. Hewett closed three consecutive points with a cross-court drive into the left corner — the same shot, three times, the same landing spot.

There was another mark against Britain's wheelchair contingent at the US Open. Andy Lapthorne, a compatriot of Hewett and Reid, lost in the quad doubles — the event for players affected in all four limbs — partnering Leon Els of South Africa. They fell to Sam Schroder of the Netherlands and Jin Woodman of Australia 4-6 6-3 10-8. Same format, same three-stage script, opposite outcome.

That contrast says a great deal about how wheelchair doubles matches are decided. In both matches, the team that won the first set lost the second. In both matches, the deciding tie-break ended with a three-point margin. And in both matches, the team that won the tie-break was the team that held a more stable positional structure once the score reached the threshold of pressure.

There is a lazy way to tell the story of this day of play: Gordon Reid lost 6-1 6-0 in the singles quarter-final, then stood up, shook off the defeat, and came back with Hewett to reverse the doubles semi-final. It is a story about will. It is good, it is tidy, and it is not accurate.

Across six years of watching wheelchair tennis matches from the edge of the court, I have learned that will is not the decisive variable at this level. Every player here has already crossed thresholds of endurance that most people struggle to imagine. If will were enough to win, none of them would have to play another point.

What actually changed in those seventy seconds between the first and second sets of the doubles semi-final was a technical decision: Reid abandoned the return pattern he had used all through the opening set. In the first set he returned short, trying to keep the ball in play and wait for an error. In the second he returned deep, accepting the risk in order to push Oda out of his preferred position. It was a small change technically and a large one tactically. It did not require Reid to be stronger. It required him to accept that the old way had failed.

And this, I think, is the most misunderstood point in how the media describes wheelchair matches: people look for the human story in the athlete and overlook that this sport is a problem of position, angle and time. A wheelchair player cannot compensate for bad positioning with foot speed. They have no legs to run with. Every positional error must be corrected before the ball leaves the opponent's racket, or never corrected at all.

That is why Grand Slam wheelchair doubles looks slow to a first-time viewer. The tempo is compressed. But inside that compressed tempo runs a continuous process of calculation the eye struggles to follow.

Hewett and Reid will meet Martin de la Puente and Ruben Spaargaren in the final. De la Puente is a Spaniard who builds points with patience; Spaargaren is a Dutch partner with a heavy kick serve. It is a pair with fewer Grand Slam titles than the English duo, but also one carrying no burden of memory.

The ball rolls past, the player stays. After the final, one pair will leave New York with a title, and one pair will leave with another season to ask what did not happen.

For Hewett, the bigger question lies in the singles. He is through to the semi-finals, and Oda still stands in the road ahead — the man who had just destroyed Reid in under an hour. Does a player pouring energy into both events at 28 have enough in reserve for the two most important matches of the same week?

For Reid, the question lies elsewhere. He is past the peak of his singles career, and every season that passes is one Grand Slam fewer. Doubles is where he can still win titles. Doubles is also where he has just proved he can still correct a mistake within seventy seconds.

One beat, one day, one season. The final will answer.