The first ball of Venus Williams's match against Sofia Kenin was struck at 12.13am — the latest start to a match in US Open history. It finished at one minute past two in the morning. Several thousand people were still in Arthur Ashe Stadium to watch it.
Nothing went wrong, exactly. Novak Djokovic's first-round defeat by Mariano Navone had gone the full five sets on the same court earlier in the day, and everything behind it moved back. That is how a session schedule works: each match takes the time it takes, and the one after it waits.
By Thursday the slack had run out
New York's weather then did the rest. Alex de Minaur's opening match was postponed to day four, and when it finally started he sat through a further two-hour rain delay. He came through it, and into a backlog: the Guardian reported on Thursday that the world No 7 now needs seven best-of-five-set matches in twelve days to win the title, with three of them potentially falling on three consecutive days.
"These tournaments, it's all about adapting and that's the name of the game," de Minaur said. It is a generous way to describe being asked to play a Grand Slam on a compressed clock.
Why this is an operations problem, not a weather problem
Every outdoor event carries weather risk. What determines whether that risk turns into a 12.13am start is how much slack the schedule was built with — and a Grand Slam has structurally very little. Men's matches run to five sets, so their length cannot be predicted or capped. Only one court, Arthur Ashe, has a roof that keeps play going. Tickets are sold by session, which means a session cannot simply be abandoned and rescheduled without refund exposure and a crowd that has already travelled. Each of those is a reasonable decision on its own. Together they produce a schedule that absorbs one five-setter and a rain front by pushing into the middle of the night.
The people who pay for it are the players, who get less recovery than the draw assumes, and the ticket-holders, who bought an evening and got the small hours. Neither group has a mechanism for objecting.
What an operator can take from it
This is the least glamorous constraint in event design and the one most often discovered late: the difference between a programme that is full and a programme that is over-full is invisible on a good day and unmissable on a bad one. Slack has no value until the weather turns, which is precisely why it is the first thing cut when there is demand to satisfy and inventory to sell.
The tournament runs to 13 September. Whether the schedule recovers depends on New York's weather rather than on anything the organisers can now decide — which is itself the point.
Source
Original summary by Proventier.