Calm under pressure and strong bonding with Venus: How Yuki Bhambri made personal Grand Slam history

Indian tennis has been experiencing a resurgence of late, with the country recently pulling off a historic victory over ninth-seed Switzerland in their Davis Cup 2025 World Group I tie, beating a European nation for the first time in over three decades in the process.

That wasn’t the only highlight of the month for Indian tennis though with Yuki Bhambri fighting his way into the semi-finals of the US Open men’s doubles competition with New Zealand’s Michael Venus. Bhambri, India’s top-ranked men’s doubles player currently at 22nd, and his Kiwi partner defeated Croatia’s Nikola Mektić and USA’s Rajeev Ram 6-3, 6(6)-7(8), 6-3 in a marathon battle to enter the last-four of a Grand Slam for the first time ever.

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The party, unfortunately, came to an end in another hard-fought encounter, with the Bhambri-Venus pair ending up on the losing side this time with a 7-6 (7-2) 6-7 (5-7) 4-6 defeat at the hands of Britain’s Neal Skupski and Joe Salisbury – ranked ninth and 11 respectively in the ATP doubles ladder.

What matters for Bhambri, though, is the fact that he had kept the Indian flag flying high at Flushing Meadows towards the business end of the Grand Slam. After all, the Anirudh Chandrasekar-Vijay Sundar Prashanth pair, as well as veteran star Rohan Bopanna and Arjun Kadhe – the two competing with different partners – crashed out earlier in the tournament, with none of them making it past the second round.

‘Highlight of my doubles career’

In an exclusive conversation with Firstpost, Bhambri described his journey in the 2025 US Open as the highlight of his doubles career, which he has been focusing on in recent years after quitting singles – where he had been ranked as high as 83rd.

“The Grand Slams are where everyone wants to perform. It’s the biggest stage for us tennis players. Which comes obviously four times a year. So yeah, would probably say that the semi-finals would probably be a highlight of my doubles career,” Bhambri said during the chat.

“You’re quite aware, quite a lot of nervous energy. Every match sort of feels very, very difficult. It’s the biggest stage for us tennis players to perform, because there’s so few and come so rarely – four times a year. When you’re out there, you want to be trying to do the best that you can. And I think this is with everyone, going into every match.

“So every match sort of feels quite nerve-wracking and nothing comes easy. Even the first few rounds that we went through, the scorelines were suggesting quite easy, but I know inside our heads, we are fighting so hard to sort of stay calm and to stay focused in the moment,” he added.

Bhambri went on to suggest that he’s just getting started with his semi-final run in New York and will be aiming to compete in a Grand Slam final in the future.

“It was fantastic to be able to make a semi-final at the US Open, but hopefully that’s just a start and I can continue and put up even better performances next season onwards.”

Bhambri reflects on his bond with doubles partner Venus

Bhambri has partnered with a number of players during his doubles run. The list includes Australia’s Alexei Popyrin, with whom he won the Dubai Tennis Championships this year, the biggest title of his career, as well as South Africa’s Lloyd Harris and compatriot Saketh Myneni – winning his maiden ATP title with the former.

Bhambri, however, appears to have a special bond with 37-year-old Venus – who had won the 2017 French Open with Ryan Harrison. Developing a strong chemistry with one’s partner, after all, is the foundation to success in doubles tennis, whether in the men’s, women’s or mixed categories.

Having known one another for a decade-and-a-half, Bhambri and Venus have a fair understanding of each other’s style of play. More importantly, though, they have found a way to achieve a synergy between their styles of play, which was the key to their success at Flushing Meadows.

“We’ve been friends for over 15 years. We’ve played for the first time in 2014 at the Australian Open where we made a third round back then. We lost to Leander Paes and Radek Stepnek. So a long, long time ago, and I didn’t really get to play much again, because I was still focused on the singles and he had made a transition to doubles. But, we did put a lot of work in before,” he continued.

“No one would have really seen that result coming, especially the first few weeks that we had at the hard court season. But we put in a lot of hours trying to understand each other’s games, trying to improve. We’ve both seen each other from the outside. We both always have wanted to play with each other. And this is the first time that we’ve really had the opportunity to do so.

“So we’re quite clean and doing well. And I think it was great as well for morale to ride at the end of the US hard court swing to go out there, a few matches and make that run,” added Bhambri, who was inspired to pick up a tennis racquet after watching his sisters play and grew up idolising Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, and later Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

Wearing a different hat as mentor

It’s not just his doubles career that Bhambri’s focused on at the moment. The 33-year-old has also taken to guiding budding tennis talents as a mentor at the RoundGlass Tennis Academy, where he hopes his influence will help produce the next generation of tennis stars down the road.

“I’ve been associated with them for over a year now, and really got into it because of my coach Aditya Sacheva, who moved from Delhi to Chandigarh and is working with a lot of great talents. In fact, one of them is also on the Davis Cup team. So to have two athletes from the same foundation, same academy to be on Davis Cup team in tennis is, I think, quite a big achievement. So they’re obviously doing great things out there.

“My association started because of my tennis coach and he sort of moved base there, and I have started follow that and be as much as I can at the academy trying to live a lot there train and mentor some of the young crop as well for them to sort of hopefully shine through men and women and see a lot more dominance in tennis,” Bhambri signed off.