‘I make the guy miss before me, even if it takes 50 shots’
Daniil Medvedev credits relentless consistency for his summer success, he tells Simon Briggs
Concentration. Resilience. Gumption. Not the most glamorous qualities, perhaps, but essential to success on the tennis court – and currently lacking among some of the young pretenders who are looking to overhaul the eternal trio: Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.
Which is where Daniil Medvedev comes in. Now 23, Medvedev used to feel like the forgotten man of the muchvaunted Nextgen (marketing-speak for the group of young braves born in the mid-1990s). But that was before the American hard-court season.
In a burst of scintillating performances over the past four weeks, Medvedev reached the finals of Washington and Montreal before landing his first ATP Masters title in Cincinnati on Sunday. This stunning sequence halved his ranking to No5 in the world, carried him to a tourleading tally of 44 victories for the season and made him the fourth
favourite for the US Open, starting on Monday. How has he done it? By putting ball after ball back in court and covering more ground than the Roman Empire at its peak.
“That’s my style,” he told The Daily Telegraph during the European summer. “It’s about having the consistency to not make unforced errors and make the guy miss before me, even if it’s after 50 shots.”
You might think, from this description, that Medvedev is the sort of natural athlete who runs from corner to corner without visible effort. This is not the case. He stands 6ft 6in – too tall, according to received wisdom, to be a great mover – and his lack of muscularity makes him resemble a long piece of spaghetti.
After one of his trademark long rallies, he often seems to be suffering more than his opponent. Having scored his maiden victory over Djokovic in Cincinnati last week, he admitted that “every tough exchange we had I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to fall down. That’s it. The match is finished’.”
But while Medvedev might give off the soulful air of a pilgrim toiling through the desert, you rarely see his effort level dip below maximum. Instead, he fuels himself with defiance. Of the new wave of contenders, he may be the one who hates losing the most.
So where do these marathon-man credentials stem from?
“I think it’s more mental [than physical],” Medvedev said. “Practice is where you work on these things, you cannot just go on the court and say ‘OK, today I am not going to miss’.
“I do many practices where guys are moving me all over the court and I just have to try to find a way to win the point. Sometimes it’s just by not missing. Of course, you cannot play in the middle of the court otherwise you are going to get killed. You need to play deep and stuff. It’s mentally tough in practice, and then in matches you just do what you do in practice.”
At times, Medvedev’s intensity can spill over into uncontrollable
fury. Take the incident with Stefanos Tsitsipas in Miami last year, which required the chair umpire to separate the two players.
“He is a small kid who doesn’t know how to fight,” Medvedev groused that afternoon, as Tsitsipas – who is actually 6ft 4in – marched smartly off the court. More than a year on, Medvedev told The Telegraph that he does not interact with Tsitsipas at all, even though their parents are friends (Tsitsipas’s mother Julia comes from Moscow) and they shared a private jet from Washington to Montreal earlier this month.
“In real life I am really calm,” he said. “On court I can be more angry. It happens especially when in my opinion – even if it’s not true – there is some injustice going on. When you’re in the game, you have a lot of adrenalin going on. I am not happy with what I did in Wimbledon [where he reacted to a five-set loss to journeyman Ruben Bemelmans by throwing coins at the umpire’s chair, as if to imply that she had been bought]. I am sorry for what I did there.
“Talking about Stefanos in Miami, I think it was totally his fault. It’s not for me to decide, but that’s just my opinion.”
Having grown up as part of a powerful Russian trio alongside Karen Khachanov (now ranked No9) and Andrey Rublev (who would be higher than 47 but for his recent back trouble), Medvedev plays the long game in every sense. He lagged behind these contemporaries at junior level, but has now beaten them both in the past fortnight.
In keeping with Russian tradition, the three men all compete on the chessboard as well as the tennis court. Surprisingly, though, Medvedev admits that he cannot find the same level of application while he is sitting down. “I like to play chess. But I started to be so impatient. To stay 1hr 30min, playing one game! I would rather watch a video for 10 minutes.
“Three years ago, I was playing my coach a lot, and the guy takes 10 minutes for one step. I couldn’t anymore. So I said ‘OK, we don’t play’. It was good games, but it was like two hours. Then I played against Andrey and we played one game in 15 minutes, but it was two different things, because 15 minutes is also too fast. You’re like, ‘I can’t even think!’”
In person, Medvedev gives off a playfulness that is wholly absent from his tennis game. He genuinely seems to enjoy the touring life – whether that means the travel, the interviews or the short video messages he records on his iphone. Asked who should play him in any future film, he grinned and said: “I’ve heard this from a few people: I look like Quentin Tarantino. One guy told me this when I was 18. I looked at the photos and I say, ‘Yeah it’s true’. So now I always say Tarantino. And I love his movies.”
And why wouldn’t he? If Medvedev and Tarantino have one thing in common, it is that they both take a format designed to last 90 minutes and stretch it beyond three hours.