It happened again. Of course he did.
Two tennis players, starting around midnight, battle until almost dawn in front of a group of fans, with a team of kids in their early teens running after the balls at almost four in the morning.
Last year it was Andy Murray dueling with Thanasi Kokkinakis until the night sky started to lighten around 4am. On Thursday and Friday it was Daniil Medvedev of Russia Emil Ruusuvuori of Finland performs the tennis version of the 2am jazz set.
“I wouldn’t have stayed,” Medvedev said in an on-court interview after completing his comeback from two sets down to eliminate Ruusuvuori 3-6, 6-7(1), 6-4, 7-6(1). , 6-0. Judging by the result, Ruusuvuori decided against it and it was hard to blame him.
The dynamic would seem absurd if it weren’t so routine. The two major tournaments where this happens, the Australian and US Open, seem to treat this as a badge of honor rather than a serious risk to the players involved, especially the one who wins the match, goes to bed around 6am morning, then has to come back the next day.
(Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
Medvedev was floating around Melbourne Park mid-afternoon Friday, after a strange night’s sleep and trying to figure out how to prepare for Saturday night’s match against Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada.
“Today I wake up at 7 for the match and I’m sure he went to sleep at that time,” Karen Khachanov, Medvedev’s good friend and compatriot, said on Friday after his victory over Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic. “There should be limits because especially in the best of five, you know the match can last up to five hours and then you start at 11pm. This is not normal, it is not healthy for anyone to recover, prepare for the next day, for the next game. You lose a full night’s sleep. Sleeping is part of recovery, one of the biggest parts. The food, everything we do, the treatments, the ice baths. All this stuff and you don’t sleep. So how will you feel the next day?”
In recent years, a growing number of players have said enough.
“Late night matches don’t just harm the players – they have negative consequences for the fans, ball kids, event employees and all stakeholders involved,” Ahmad Nassar, executive director of the Professional Tennis Player Association, the Novak organization Djokovic co-founded in 2020 to address, among other issues, the working conditions of arguably the sport’s most important people. “From a health and safety standpoint, it’s not optimal, frankly it’s not right,” Nassar said.
Pressure from the PTPA – as well as Jannik Sinner’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Masters in November after winning a match that started at 12.30am and ended at nearly 3am – helped force officials from the men’s and women’s tours, the ATP and the WTA are committed to banning the start of matches after 11pm starting next year. Matches scheduled for a court still in use after 10.30pm will be moved to another court and both tours have told tournament organizers that they want night sessions to start at 6.30pm rather than 7pm or 7pm: 30, with no more than two games scheduled. night time.
(Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
However, as tennis is tennis, with seven different organizations allowed to make their own rules with little input from active players, the four major tournaments – Wimbledon, US Open, Australian Open and French Open – do not have to follow this rule. .
Late-night arrivals are not a problem at Wimbledon, which has a 11 p.m. curfew, or the French Open, which only schedules one match in the night sessions, but Melbourne and New York do not enforce curfews, so some of their Greatest matches end up taking place in front of a few hundred brave souls.
“It’s a very obvious thing that needs to change,” Andy Murray said last week of late-night starts and finishes and the tour’s rule changes. “From a player’s point of view, it will definitely help recovery for the next day’s games and things like that. “I certainly think for the fans and for the tournament, it will probably look a little more professional if you don’t finish at three or four in the morning.”
Tennis Australia has made some changes to the tournament this year, aimed at avoiding late-night starts and finishes. Notably, it scheduled only two afternoon matches on the main courts instead of three, thus reducing the possibility of a late start to the evening session.
It expanded the first round from two to three days, allowing more space to schedule the first 128 singles matches. This had little effect on late starts because the evening session start time remained at 7pm and because tennis matches are longer than they used to be because there is more depth, more athleticism and points, so matches, sets and matches last longer.
On opening night, reigning women’s champion Aryna Sabalenka entered the court at 11.30pm following Novak Djokovic’s four-hour battle with Dino Prizmic.
It should be noted, and Tennis Australia officials made a point of doing so, that a series of cascading events led to the late start and finish on Thursday.
Two unexpected rains occurred in the early afternoon, the first of which delayed play at Rod Laver Arena because no rain was forecast and the roof was open. Iga Swiatek generally approaches matches as if she were going to a Taylor Swift concert, but her duel with Danielle Collins lasted more than three hours.
(Robert Prange/Getty Images)
Then Carlos Alcaraz’s victory over Lorenzo Sonego lasted almost three and a half hours. As play doesn’t start until midday at Rod Laver, compared to 11am on other courts, the long afternoon matches have pushed the start of the evening session back to 7pm. Then the first match of the evening, between Elena Rybakina and Anna Blinkova, lasted almost three hours and featured a decisive tie-break with a final score of 22-20, the longest tie-break in Grand Slam history.
Medvedev remained in the tunnel for half an hour waiting for it to finish. He finally entered the pitch around 11.30pm. By then another, albeit smaller, show pitch, about 250 meters from Rod Laver, had been available for almost two hours. Four hours and five sets later, Medvedev was in the third round.
Two men’s and two women’s matches on average at the Australian Open should represent around nine hours of tennis. Between Thursday and Friday morning, the action on Rod Laver lasted almost 14 hours.
There was also an advantage to finishing late, late, which Tennis Australia officials announced in the dim light of day on Friday afternoon. They followed him on social media and saw many fans in Europe and the United States, who, given the double-digit time difference, were able to enjoy Medvedev’s triumph for much of their working day.
It was enough for the world number 3 to spend the night.
(Top photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)