United Airlines loses, then finds, Naomi Osaka's tennis bags ahead of Cincinnati Open

Secure the bag, United! Naomi Osaka's week at the Cincinnati Open nearly got derailed before it began after United Airlines briefly lost track of her luggage.

The former world No. 1 and four-time Grand Slam champion took to social media shortly after 7:30 p.m. EDT Friday night with a plea to locate her misplaced bags, which had disappeared somewhere between her leaving Toronto and arriving at her next destination: Cincinnati. The main draw of the WTA 1000 tournament in nearby Mason, Ohio begins Tuesday.

"Lol United lost my bags and if I don’t get them tonight or tomorrow I literally can’t play Cinncinati [sic]," Osaka wrote in the post, tagging the airline.

But within a half hour, United slid into her replies to tell her that it wanted to help, and Cincinnati's Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, known colloquially as CVG Airport, also chimed in.

With manpower secured, the situation was soon resolved. Just short of three hours later, the airline replied again, notifying Osaka shortly after 10 p.m. that her bags had been located.

Per an X post by Eleanor Adams, the longtime manager of the Charleston tournament that is run by the same ownership group as the Cincinnati event, Osaka's bags were then recovered by the event's tournament transportation team.

Shortly before 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Osaka told fans in another X update that she and her bags had been reunited.

After a second-round loss to Elise Mertens in Toronto, Osaka hopes to kick her US Open preparations into high gear at the Lindner Family Tennis Center, where she reached the quarterfinals in 2019. She last won a match in Cincinnati in 2021, and missed the tournament last year while on maternity leave.

She did reach the final of the event formerly called the Western & Southern Open in 2020, but it was held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center as part of the protected environment created that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.