Zheng Qinwen trailed 5-0 in the first set and still beat No. 8 seed Iga Swiatek 7-5, 6-3 to reach the U.S. Open quarterfinals, the second straight match in which she has erased that exact deficit. She is the first qualifier to reach the final eight at Flushing Meadows since Emma Raducanu won the whole tournament in 2021.
The repetition is what makes this worth tracking rather than filing away as a one-off. A single comeback from 5-0 is an anomaly; doing it twice in a row against tour-level opposition points to something in how Zheng is reading matches early, not just how she is finishing them.
The next opponent will tell us more than the seed number suggests. If she builds a third slow start into a third comeback, the conversation shifts from lucky patch to genuine pattern, and qualifier becomes an inadequate word for what she is doing in New York.