On April 27, the WTA officially announced that Athens, Greece, will host a WTA 250 tournament starting this year, marking the city’s return to the WTA tour after a 35-year hiatus. The event replaces the WTA 250 Jiangxi Open held in Jiujiang, meaning the Chinese city will lose its tour-level status.
The WTA’s promotional poster for the Athens event
Surprisingly, Jiujiang is still scheduled to host a WTA 125 event from May 4-10, while the WTA calendar also lists the WTA 250 Jiangxi Open from November 2-8. This means Jiujiang will hold two WTA events in 2026: a lower-level challenger in the first half and a tour-level event in the second half.
For a small to mid-sized city like Jiujiang, hosting two WTA tournaments in one year is extremely rare. The only explanation is that from 2027 onward, Jiujiang will no longer host a WTA 250 event, effectively downgrading to WTA 125. The tournament is being demoted.
The current WTA 250 event in Jiujiang, known as the Jiangxi Open, is held at the Jiujiang International Tennis Center. It awards 250 ranking points to the champion, with a total prize money of $283,000 in 2026. The singles draw features 32 players, and the doubles draw has 16 teams. Originally launched in 2014 as a WTA 125 event, it was held at the Nanchang Tennis Center before moving to Jiujiang in 2024, when it was upgraded to WTA 250.
After being replaced by Athens, the tournament will move to the Olympic Tennis Center in Athens, Greece, maintaining hard courts and the same draw sizes for singles and doubles.
Maria Sakkari, the most famous Greek women’s tennis player currently, has reached ten WTA finals and is the highest-ranked Greek female player in history, with a career-high ranking of No. 3. “Being able to walk onto a court in my hometown and hear the Greek crowd will be one of the highlights of my career,” Sakkari said. “Athens is where I first picked up a tennis racket and dreamed of becoming a professional. Having a WTA tour event here is truly special and a great opportunity to showcase Greek tennis and inspire young players.”
This is the first WTA event in Athens since the Athens Cup in 1990. Sakkari’s mother, Angeliki Kanellopoulou, reached the final of the inaugural event in 1986. The WTA stated, “The addition of Athens means Greece becomes one of 27 countries and regions on the WTA tour this season, demonstrating the global appeal of women’s tennis and its remarkable growth.”
While the WTA highlights growth, for Jiangxi and Jiujiang, women’s tennis is clearly shrinking—from the launch of the WTA 125 challenger in 2014, to the upgrade to WTA 250, and now back to WTA 125.
