Culture
Medvedev's 3.40am finish is latest absurd example of why tennis has to change
It happened again. Of course it did.
Two tennis players, starting near midnight, battling nearly to sunrise in front of a scattering of fans, with a squad of kids in their early teenage years scurrying after balls at nearly four in the morning.
Last year it was Andy Murray duelling with Thanasi Kokkinakis until the night sky began to lighten at around 4am. On Thursday, and into Friday, it was Daniil Medvedev of Russia and Emil Ruusuvuori of Finland doing the tennis version of the 2am jazz set.
“I would not have stayed,” Medvedev said in an on-court interview after he completed his comeback from two sets down and eliminated Ruusuvuori 3-6, 6-7(1), 6-4, 7-6(1), 6-0. Judging from the scoreline, Ruusuvuori decided not to and it was hard to blame him.
The dynamic would seem absurd if it wasn’t so routine. The main two tournaments where this happens, the Australian and U.S. Opens, seem to treat this as a badge of honor rather than a serious risk for the players involved, especially the one that wins the match, gets to bed some time around 6am, then has to come back the next day.
(Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
Medvedev was floating around Melbourne Park by mid-afternoon on Friday after grabbing a strange night of sleep and trying to figure out how to prepare for his Saturday evening match against Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada.
“I wake 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 on Friday after his win over Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic. “There should be certain limits because especially the best-of-five, you know that match can go up to five hours and then you start at 11pm. This is not normal, not healthy for anybody to recover, to get ready for the next day, the next match. You lose a complete night of sleep. Sleeping is part of the recovery, one of the biggest parts. The food, everything we do, treatments, ice baths. All this stuff and you don’t sleep. So how are you going to feel the next day?”
In recent years, a growing number of players have said enough is enough.
“Late-night matches don’t only harm players — they have negative consequences for fans, ball kids, event employees, and all stakeholders involved,” Ahmad Nassar, the executive director of the Professional Tennis Player Association, the organization Novak Djokovic co-founded in 2020 to address, among other issues, working conditions for arguably the most important people in the sport. “From a health and safety standpoint, it’s not optimal, it’s frankly not fair,” Nassar said.
Pressure from the PTPA – as well as Jannik Sinner’s decision to pull out of the Paris Masters in November after he won a match that started at 12.30am and finished at nearly 3am — helped force officials with the men’s and women’s tours, the ATP and the WTA, to agree to prohibit matches from starting after 11pm as of next year. Matches scheduled for a court that is still being used after 10.30pm will be moved to another court and both tours have told tournament organizers they want night sessions to begin at 6.30pm rather than 7 or 7.30pm, with no more than two matches on the night schedule.
(Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
However, tennis being tennis, with seven different organizations empowered to enact their own rules with little input from active players, the four most important tournaments — Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the Australian Open and the French Open — do not have to follow this rule.
Late-night finishes are not an issue at Wimbledon, which has an 11pm curfew, or at the French Open, which schedules just one match in its night sessions, but Melbourne and New York do not adhere to curfews, so some of their greatest matches end up unfolding in front of a few hundred hardy souls.
“It’s a very obvious thing that needs to change,” Andy Murray said last week of the late-night starts and finishes and the tour rule changes. “From a player’s perspective, it’ll definitely help with recovery for the following day’s matches and things like that. I certainly think for the fans and the tournament, it just probably looks a wee bit more professional if you’re not finishing at three or four in the morning.”
Tennis Australia made some tweaks to the tournament this year that it said were aimed at avoiding late-night starts and finishes. Most notably, it has scheduled just two afternoon matches on the main show courts rather than three, lessening the chance of a late start to the evening session.
It expanded the first round to three days from two, allowing more room to schedule the first 128 singles matches. That has had little effect on late starts because the evening session start time remained 7pm and because tennis matches are longer than they used to be because there is more depth, more athleticism and points, thereby games, sets and matches last longer.
On the opening night, the women’s defending champion, Aryna Sabalenka, walked onto the court at 11.30pm following Novak Djokovic’s four-hour fight with Dino Prizmic.
It should be noted, and Tennis Australia officials made a point of doing so, that a cascading series of events led to the late start and finish on Thursday.
Two unexpected rainfalls occurred early in the afternoon, the first of which delayed play on Rod Laver Arena because rain was not in the forecast and its roof was open. Iga Swiatek generally blows through matches like she has a Taylor Swift concert to get to, but her duel with Danielle Collins lasted more than three hours.
(Robert Prange/Getty Images)
Then Carlos Alcaraz’s win over Lorenzo Sonego lasted nearly three and a half hours. Since play in Rod Laver does not start until noon, compared with 11am on other courts, the long afternoon matches pushed back the 7pm start of the evening session. Then the first evening match, between Elena Rybakina and Anna Blinkova, lasted nearly three hours and included a deciding-set tiebreaker with a final score of 22-20, the longest tiebreaker in Grand Slam history.
Medvedev stood in the tunnel for half an hour waiting for it to end. He finally took the court at around 11.30pm. Another, albeit smaller, show court, roughly 250 meters from Rod Laver, had been available for nearly two hours at that point. 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 account for about nine hours of tennis. On Thursday and into Friday morning, the action on Rod Laver lasted nearly 14 hours.
There was even one benefit of the late, late finish that officials with Tennis Australia touted on Friday afternoon in the bleary light of the day. They had been looking at social media and saw lots of fans in Europe and the United States, who, given the double-digit-hour time difference, got to enjoy Medvedev’s triumph through a chunk of their workday.
All it took was for the world No 3 to pull an all-nighter.
(Top photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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