Emma Navarro arrives at the 2026 US Open with an explanation for a season that swung between big wins and long silences. During ESPN’s broadcast of her Wimbledon match against Marta Kostyuk on 2 July, commentator Chris McKendry said on air that Navarro has hypothyroidism. It was the first on-record confirmation of the condition behind her troubled year.
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The diagnosis puts a name to a stretch that looked, from outside, like two different careers. Navarro reached a career-high ranking of world No. 8 in September 2024, the year she made her first Grand Slam semifinal, at the US Open. She got there having never won a previous main-draw match at the tournament, one of only six players to do that in 40 years. In the quarterfinal she beat Paula Badosa, winning 24 of the last 28 points.
By 2026 that ranking had slid to No. 39. Navarro stepped away from the tour for two months that spring, missing action from mid-March to early May because of an illness she did not name at the time. Her ranking had stood at No. 10 when she won the Merida title in February 2025.
The comeback that started in Rome
She returned at the Italian Open in May and lost in the first round, then reached the last 16 of a smaller WTA 125 tournament in Paris. Her third event back was the Internationaux de Strasbourg, where she won her third WTA Tour title and her first on clay, beating world No. 9 Victoria Mboko 6-0, 5-7, 6-2 in the final. Of the year and a half before that win, she said she had “health challenges to work through.”
The form kept swinging. Marie Bouzkova beat Navarro, whom the BBC described as the former world number eight, 7-6 (7-5), 4-6, 6-2 in the Nottingham Open final on 21 June. Eleven days later came the Wimbledon broadcast, and with it, a name for the pattern.
Hypothyroidism is usually managed with medication and regular bloodwork, so recovery depends on ongoing monitoring rather than one fix. At the time, Navarro had not issued her own statement on the diagnosis, and neither her team nor the tournament had released a medical bulletin confirming it.
Arriving at the US Open
She now arrives at Flushing Meadows with a 21-19 record for the season, after a third-round loss to Jessica Pegula in Cincinnati. She opened the tournament in mixed doubles with Tommy Paul, the pair given a wild card into the revamped event. In a clip posted by her sponsor FP Movement, she said she had waited “until I was healthy enough to enjoy the challenge.”
Her best Grand Slam result is still that 2024 semifinal at the same tournament. Whether the player who beat Mboko in Strasbourg or the one who lost to Bouzkova in Nottingham turns up in New York is what the next two weeks will answer.
