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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This change never occurred. ==Past finals==