Bagel Bites: Now we're cookin'

Internet ephemera from the tennis world and beyond. Have something you want to include? Join the Discord  – we have a really nice and active community growing there – or hmu on Bluesky.

• Previously on The Bagel: I put my lawyer hat on.

• Zheng Qinwen is out of the Australian Open, still working her way back from the elbow surgery that sidelined her after Wimbledon. More and more, it feels like her win at the China Open last fall was an incredible effort and also....maybe came too soon. She hasn't been able to play since. I hope she takes her time and returns at 100%. The WTA is a better product when she's in the mix. (WTA)
• The Brisbane QFs are set and boy do we have a doozy of a slate tonight:

• Madison Keys came through another thriller, edging Diana Shnaider in a third-set tiebreaker. Her reward: No.1 Aryna Sabalenka, who hasn't dropped a set yet. So yes, we get a rematch of the Australian Open final. Eep!
• Two matches, six sets for the hardest working woman in tennis, Jessica Pegula. She edged Anna Kalinskaya 6-4 in the third in her season opener and 6-3 in the third to beat Dayana Yastremska. She'll play Liudmila Samsonova.

• Marta Kostyuk posted the upset of the week so far, knocking off No.2 seed Amanda Anisimova in straight sets. She'll play No. 6 seed Mirra Andreeva, who saved match points to beat Linda Noskova in three sets.
• Andreeva finished her 2026 season on a three-match losing streak and snapped that with back-to-back wins in Brisbane. A win over Kostyuk would give her three wins at a tournament for the first time since Wimbledon.
• The last quarterfinal will see Elena Rybakina, who's on a 13-match win streak, take on Karolina Muchova. Delightful. They're tied 1-1 in their H2H.
• The upsets continued at United Cup, where Belgium stunned the Czechs by sweeping the singles to advance to Saturday's semfiinals. Zizou Bergs, who has had an outstanding week with straight set wins over Felix Auger-Aliassime and Jakub Mensik. The latter gave the Czechs a 1-0 lead and Elise Mertens sent them through, beating Barbora Krejcikova 5-7, 6-1, 7-5. (ATP)
• Greece is out, but Stefanos Tsitsipas is feeling himself. (ATP)
• The last United quarterfinals will be played tonight, with Poland taking on Australia. That crowd will no doubt have Ken Rosewall Arena ROCKING. Can Hubie pull off another miracle? (ATP)

• At the Brisbane ATP 250, Raphael Collignon upset "his idol" Grigor Dimitrov. That's a weird sentence! Strong week for Belgian tennis. (ATP)
• Another weird sentence: Michael Mmoh beat Karen Khachanov. (ATP)
• An important thing about me is that I will always stand up for truth. It takes a lot of courage to do that and I thank you for your silent but deafening applause. To that end, let me say this loudly and without fear: this shot should be legal:

• More details on the ESPN team that will be heading down to Melbourne this year, with confirmations from Pam Shriver and Brad Gilbert that they weren't asked back and Darren Cahill's future still up in the air. As a person who absolutely hates change, I don't like any of this! But as a person who also sees the trend across all tennis industries, I guess this isn't a surprise. (Awful Announcing)

• Although...the Cahill thing is a surprise. He's been a commentator/coach for nigh on 15 or more years, going all the way back to the Adidas Performance Program and Simona Halep, and it's never been a problem for ESPN – though generally, it IS a problem from a conflicts perspective, though I felt like initially the problem was "solved" by Darren commentating on the non-impacted tour, e.g. he was almost always on men's matches when he coached Simona. So if it is the Sinner coaching relationship that knocked him out this time, that's certainly contrary to how ESPN treated the issue in the past. And that's a big loss too. From a technical perspective, no one was (or is) better than Cahill for my money. And with all the younger folks joining the booth, he would be good to have around to help shepherd them all in and show them the ropes. All that is to say, I hope he's either back at Wimbledon, gets brought on by TNT for Roland Garros, or gets picked up by Eurosport. He's just too good to leave on the commentary sidelines.
• Sidenote: JANNIK YOU BETTER BE PAYING YOUR BOY EXTRA THO.

• Entry list for Abu Dhabi WTA 500 is out, led by Elena Rybakina and defending champion Belinda Bencic. (WTA)
• THINGS WE LOVE TO SEE: Blair Henley – who is THE BEST – has joined Kim Clijsters' Love All podcast as a co-host and moderator. Their first guest? Ons Jabeur.

• Wait, no one told me the ATP has a pet food sponsor?!?!? (ATP)
• Probably more relevant from that press release: Here are some important ATP rule changes for 2026 – some we've already talked about, like the heat rule, safe guarding, and minimum tournament counts – including a new profit-sharing model for the ATP 500s:

Building on this progress, the ATP continues to evolve in 2026, introducing a series of reforms focused on player welfare, rankings, technology and more, including the following initiatives:

Rankings & Scheduling Flexibility
The rankings breakdown is reduced from 19 to 18 countable events in 2026, with one less ATP 500 commitment to create more scheduling flexibility. Separately, results earned in the week between the Paris Masters and the Nitto ATP Finals will now count toward the following year’s PIF ATP Live Race to Turin, delivering a simplified narrative towards the end of the season.

Injury & Parental Protection
For the first time, players who miss two consecutive automatic entry events (Masters 1000s or Grand Slams) due to injury will be able to replace those 0-point scores (Masters 1000 only) with subsequent results, up to three times per season. Separately, withdrawals related to the birth or adoption of a child will be excused without zero-pointers at Masters 1000 or ATP 500 events.

Heat Rule Introduction
A new Heat Rule is being implemented across ATP events, with clear protocols to suspend or adjust play in extreme conditions, reflecting ATP’s commitment to player safety and evolving climate realities.

ATP Safeguarding Programme
A new Safeguarding Programme will launch across the ATP Tour and Challenger Tour, creating a global, trauma-informed framework to prevent and address abuse and misconduct.

ATP 500 Prize-Money Formula
In a significant step toward further strengthening the partnership between players and tournaments through transparency and aligned interests, ATP 500 tournaments will adopt a profit-sharing model in 2026, aligned from the principles of the formula already established at Masters 1000 level.

Baseline Financial-Security Programme
The Baseline program will continue in 2026 after providing more than $2 million of support in 2025 to secure minimum-income thresholds for Top 250 players, as well as supporting younger athletes and those returning from injury.

Video-Review Expansion
Video review technology, successfully implemented at ATP Masters 1000 tournaments in 2025, will be available on all courts at ATP 500 events in 2026, with ATP 250 introduction set for 2027. Live Electronic Line Calling will continue to be deployed across all ATP Tour events.

Ball Centralisation Advancements
Following major progress in 2025, ball centralisation will advance further in 2026, with almost all tournament swings aligned on ball manufacturers to enhance playing conditions and reduce variability for players.

• Here's a nice profile on Jodie Foster. (Variety)
• A personal rule: always read Adam Nayman. (The Ringer)
• Liz Franczak, the co-host of the True Anon podcast, nailed this in a Substack interview:

EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?

LIZ FRANCZAK: I’m not exactly moralizing about sports betting so much as structurally suspicious of it, especially with the NBA. The league spent decades turning the game into data—tracking every moment, modeling every possession—and for a long time there was just this surplus of data with nowhere to go. Gambling gets legalized and suddenly boom there’s a market for all this information.

Once that happens, you don’t really watch basketball anymore. You watch micro-events resolve. The game becomes the underlying asset, and your attention shifts to the derivative: props, odds, whether the world is conforming to the model. It’s subtle, but it changes spectatorship in a way that’s hard to undo. But this is all part of a much larger epistemic shift and sports betting (along with Polymarket, Kalshi, etc.) just makes this shift legible—how we’re increasingly trained to experience the world through models and odds and expected outcomes. I think it alters subjectivity in ways we’re barely naming yet.

• Indeed, after leaving Evolve, Naomi Osaka is back with IMG. (Instagram)
• Jannik and Carlos are reportedly getting €2 million each for playing the Seoul exhibition. (La Gazzetta)
• Meanwhile, Novak is out of Adelaide. So the top three seeds will go into Melbourne without a tune-up, which says more about the field than them lol.
• Aryna Sabalenka joins the chorus about the tennis schedule. She says she'll skip events, which isn't that different from what she did last year. (BBC)
• This whole kerfuffle about the Egyptian wild card in at the Nairobi ITF just seems way overblown to me because, like, what was the harm? No one else signed up. She didn't take a wild card away from someone else. Now she's going to get shit on, and I get it, but it's ok to just let this go and move on. (The Guardian)

• A nice ATP profile on Germany's Patrick Zahraj, who is diabetic. (ATP)
• This stuff stresses me out: Just let kids play sports for no other reason than it's a fun thing to do and you make friends and learn how to lose. (The Guardian)

• If you're a person who can't wait to watch a live draw ceremony, the Australian Open draw will take place on January 15 at 2:30pm AEDT. (AO)
• When the Australian Open says it's the Grand Slam of the Asia Pacific, it really kinda maybe means it: Chinese ride-hailing service DiDi is their official sponsor this year, not Uber.
• Hubert Hurkacz and his coach Nicolas Massu have got to be one of the big stories of Week 1. (ATP)

“It's incredible, the work ethic of Hubi. He follows everything 100 per cent. If he has to do this, he does that and more,” Massu said. “It’s not only on the court, it's outside of the court: how he takes care of the food, of the treatment, all the stretching. So I think that when you work like this, the [positive] things need to come back. You deserve to have these kinds of results.”

• PSA: STOP VIDEOTAPING STRANGERS IN PUBLIC AND MAKING FUN OF THEM ON YOUR – Oh ok: