The Rio Open, also known as the Rio Open presented by Claro for sponsorship reasons, is a tennis event on the ATP Tour and former WTA International Tournaments event. The tournament is played on outdoor clay courts at the Jockey Club Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is the only ATP Tour 500 event in South America and the only ATP Tour event in Brazil (since 2020).[2]
There have been a number of precursor tournaments to this one held in Rio de Janeiro. The Rio de Janeiro International was a combined men's and women's event played on outdoor clay courts as part of the ILTF South American Circuit from 1947 to 1967 at the Rio de Janeiro Country Club. Later, the Rio de Janeiro Open was played on indoor carpet courts from 1989 to 1990 and was the first ATP World Series event played in Brazil.[3][4] The licence for the men's event was taken over from the U.S. National Indoor Championships which did continue but was downgraded from an ATP 500 to an ATP 250 tournament.[5][6]
The first edition in 2014 was headlined by former world number one, Rafael Nadal and fellow Spanish player David Ferrer. Both of them are well known clay court specialists.
The women's tournament was discontinued and replaced by Hungarian Ladies Open after the 2016 edition.[7]
Prior to the 2019 edition, there was talk of moving the tournament from the clay court surface of Jockey Club Brasileiro to the outdoor hard courts at the Olympic Tennis Centre, which hosted the tennis events of the 2016 Summer Olympics situated in Barra Olympic Park.[8] The reasoning was to attract more world-class players to the tournament such as Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Andy Murray who consistently declined to play the event. Juan Martin del Potro once mentioned to the Rio Open director Luiz Carvalho that he would enter the Rio Open when the surface changes.[9] This change never occurred.