Ramkumar Ramanathan and Rithvik Bollipalli win ATP Challenger doubles title in Tyler, Texas; first Challenger title as a team

Ramkumar Ramanathan-Rithvik Bollipalli win ATP Challenger tennis title in Texas

The Indian tennis players beat Americans Zachary Fuchs and Wally Thayne in straight sets in the final to lift their first ATP Challenger crown as a doubles team.

India’s Ramkumar Ramanathan and Rithvik Bollipalli won the doubles title at the Texas Spine and Joint Challenger Men’s Championship 2026 ATP Challenger tennis tournament in the USA on Sunday.

The Indian tennis players defeated home favourites Zachary Fuchs and Wally Thayne 7(7)-6(2), 7(7)-6(4) in the final to clinch the crown in Texas.

In the opening set, the two doubles teams traded a break each before Ramkumar Ramanathan and Rithvik Bollipalli prevailed in the tiebreaker.

The second set followed a similar pattern as neither team dropped a single service game, triggering yet another tie-break. The top-seeded all-Indian pair once again came out on top to secure the match in one hour and 39 minutes.

This was Ramkumar Ramanathan’s 12th ATP Challenger title of his career and the fifth for Rithvik Bollipalli. However, it was their first Challenger title as a team.

The Texas Spine and Joint Men’s Championship is part of the ATP Challenger Tour calendar and was played on hard courts in Tyler, Texas.

En route to the title, Ramkumar Ramanathan and Rithvik Bollipalli beat Venezuela’s Brandon Pérez and USA’s Andrew Fenty in a super-tiebreaker in the opening round.

They then eased past Japan’s Masamichi Imamura and Matsuoka Hayato 6-1, 6-2 in the quarter-finals before defeating Japan’s Seita Watanabe and the People’s Republic of China’s Sun Fajing 6-3, 6-2 in the semis to set up a title clash.

Picture by 2024 Getty Images

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