It’s happened again. Of course.
Two tennis players, starting around midnight, battling almost until dawn in front of a scattered group of fans, with a squad of kids in their early teens running after balls at almost four in the morning.
Last year, Andy Murray dueled Thanasi Kokkinakis until the night sky began to clear around 4am. On Thursday and until Friday, it was Daniil Medvedev of Russia and Emil Ruusuvuori from Finland performing 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 and eliminating Ruusuvuori 3-6, 6-7(1), 6-4, 7-6(1). 6-0. Judging by the score, Ruusuvuori decided against it and it was hard to blame him.
The dynamic would seem absurd if it were not so routine. The two major tournaments where this happens, the Australian Open and the 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, lies around 6 am has to come back the next day.
(Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
Medvedev was floating around Melbourne Park mid-afternoon Friday after getting a strange night’s sleep and trying to figure out how to prepare for his Saturday night match against Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime.
“I got up for my match today at 7 and I’m sure that’s when he went to sleep,” Karen Khachanov, Medvedev’s good friend and fellow Russian, said Friday after his victory over Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic. “There should be certain limits because, especially best-of-five, you know the game can last five hours and then it starts at 11 p.m. This is not normal, it is not healthy for anyone to recover, prepare for the next day, the next game. You lose a full night of sleep. Sleep is part of recovery, one of the most important parts. The food, everything we do, treatments, ice baths. All this and you don’t sleep. So how will you feel the next day?
In recent years, an increasing number of players have said enough is enough.
“Night matches don’t just harm players: they have negative consequences for fans, ball boys, event employees and all stakeholders involved,” said Ahmad Nassar, executive director of the Professional Tennis Players Association, the organization co-collaborator of Novak Djokovic. founded in 2020 to address, among other issues, the working conditions of arguably the most important people in sport. “From a health and safety perspective, it’s not optimal and, frankly, it’s not fair,” 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 12:30 a.m. and ended almost 3 a.m. – helped force circuit officials men’s and women’s matches, the ATP and the WTA, to agree to ban matches starting after 11:00 p.m. from next year. Matches scheduled for a court still in use after 10:30 p.m. will be moved to another court and both circuits have told tournament organizers they want night sessions to start at 6:30 p.m. instead of 7 or 7:30 p.m. , with no more than two games on the court. night time.
(Jean Catuffé/Getty Images)
However, since tennis is tennis, with seven different organizations empowered to enact their own rules with little input from active players, the four major tournaments (Wimbledon, the US Open, the Australian Open and the Australian Open) France) do not have to follow this rule. .
Night finals are not a problem at Wimbledon, which has a 11pm curfew, or the French Open, which schedules only one match in its night sessions, but Melbourne and New York do not respect the curfew. remains, so some of their best matches end up taking place in front of a few hundred hardy souls.
“It’s something very obvious that needs to change,” Andy Murray said last week of late-night departures and arrivals and changes to tour rules. “From a player’s perspective, it will definitely help with recovery for the next day’s games and things like that. “I certainly think for the fans and the tournament, it probably looks a little more professional if you don’t finish at three or four in the morning.”
Tennis Australia made some adjustments to this year’s tournament that it said were aimed at avoiding late-night starts and finishes. Notably, it has scheduled only two afternoon matches on the main courts instead of three, reducing the possibility of a late start to the evening session.
It expanded the first round from two to three days, allowing more room to schedule the first 128 individual matches. That has had little effect on late starts because the start time for the evening session was still 7:00 pm and because tennis matches are longer than they used to be because there is more depth, more athleticism and points, for example. what games, sets and matches last longer.
On the opening night, defending women’s champion Aryna Sabalenka took the court at 11:30 p.m. after Novak Djokovic’s four-hour bout with Dino Prizmic.
It should be noted, and Tennis Australia officials made sure to do so, that a series of cascading events led to Thursday’s late start and finish.
Two unexpected rain showers occurred early in the afternoon, the first of which delayed play at Rod Laver Arena because no rain was forecast and its roof was open. Iga Swiatek usually spends matches as if she had to attend 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. With play at Rod Laver not starting until noon, compared to 11am at other courses, the long afternoon matches delayed the start of the evening session to 7pm. Then, the first match of the night, between Elena Rybakina and Anna Blinkova, lasted almost three hours and included a tiebreaker in the deciding set with a final score of 22-20, the longest tiebreak in Grand Slam history.
Medvedev remained in the tunnel for half an hour waiting for it to finish. He finally appeared in court around 11:30 p.m. Another show ring, although smaller, about 250 meters from Rod Laver, was 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 about nine hours of tennis. On Thursday and into Friday morning, the action at Rod Laver lasted almost 14 hours.
There was even a benefit to the late finish that Tennis Australia officials touted on Friday afternoon in the murky light of day. They had been watching 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 work day.
All it took was for the world number 3 to spend the entire night.
(Top photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
