Jannik Sinner is doing double duty at the 2024 BNP Paribas Open, entered in singles and doubles. The reigning Australian Open champion doesn’t often compete in doubles, but Indian Wells traditionally sees several predominant men’s singles players feature in the team format. In the women’s draw, Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula are reunited to once again play doubles together.
Here are 10 noteworthy teams from both draws to keep an eye out for as doubles begins Thursday.
With eyes set on this year’s Olympics in Paris in July, Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula feature together for the first time since the WTA Finals in late October. It’s also Gauff’s first doubles action in 2024. In their lone Indian Wells sojourn as a tandem, Gauff and Pegula exited in the second round last season to Japan’s Miyu Kato and Indonesia’s Aldila Sutjiadi.
Gauff and Pegula will encounter Sofia Kenin and former doubles No. 1 Bethanie Mattek-Sands in the first round. Mattek-Sands bagged the title in 2016 with CoCo Vandeweghe, and more recently, lifted the trophy in Abu Dhabi alongside singles Grand Slam winner Kenin.
It’s like Su-Wei Hsieh was never away. After coming back in 2023, Hsieh, 38, has won three of the four Grand Slams she has played. That included this year’s Australian Open with Elise Mertens as the duo reunited. In Hsieh’s last visit to Indian Wells in 2021, she and Mertens only dropped one set en route to the title.
Katerina Siniakova and Barbora Krejcikova landed each of the majors together, Olympic gold and last year’s Indian Wells title. But after they split, Siniakova joined forces with Storm Hunter. Knocked out in the semifinals at the Australian Open by Hsieh and Mertens, the pair went undefeated in Dubai last month.
In the doubles race to the WTA Finals, Lyudmyla Kichenok and Jelena Ostapenko hold a slender two-point advantage over Hsieh and Mertens. They particularly flourished in Australia, winning in Brisbane, making the semifinals in Adelaide and the final at the Australian Open.
Sinner does have one doubles title, in Atlanta in 2021 with the towering Reilly Opelka. He is partnering with Lorenzo Sonego in Indian Wells. Together, they won two key Davis Cup matches in November as Italy claimed the title for the first time since 1976. They were also a unit last year in Indian Wells.
Guess who the Italians meet in the first round? None other than Karen Khachanov and Andrey Rublev, Olympic medalists separately in Tokyo in 2021. The pair bagged the Masters 1000 title in Madrid last May and ended the season by winning the ATP’s Fan Favorite award in doubles.
Good friends for a while, the Atlanta-born pair of Christopher Eubanks and Ben Shelton made breakthroughs in singles last year. One made a US Open semifinal and Australian Open quarterfinal (Shelton), while the other reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon (Eubanks). Expect some cannon-like serves from the duo, who lost their opener together at the Australian Open in January. They begin with the seasoned pair of Horacio Zeballos and Marcel Granollers, the fifth seeds.
Rohan Bopanna, who turned 44 on Monday, won his first men’s doubles Grand Slam in January at the Australian Open with Australia’s Matt Ebden. The duo are also the reigning champions in Indian Wells. They flipped places in the doubles rankings this week, with Bopanna returning to No. 1 and Ebden now No. 2.
One of the longest doubles pairings around, Joe Salisbury and Rajeev Ram are the third seeds. They made history last year in New York, becoming the first men’s doubles team in more than 100 years to win three in a row at what is now the US Open. Ram and Salisbury departed Indian Wells in the first round last year, however, exiting against Hurkacz and Grigor Dimitrov.
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