By Louisa Thomas
Daniil Medvedev is tall and gaunt, with a patchy mustache under his long, sharp nose and a scrappy goatee on his chin. He is twenty-three, and his light-brown hair is retreating at the temples. He has said that he resembles Quentin Tarantino. He has high cheekbones and hooded eyes, and sometimes wears a faint smirk, although he is capable of appearing angelic. He likes to play video games, and he likes to play chess. He looks more like a professor than like a professional athlete, and he acts more like a professional wrestler than like a tennis star. He can seem like the perfect villain, and then he will turn around and talk about love. He is a figure of an indefinite, indeterminate sort, like a character from Dostoyevsky, perhaps, or someone willed into being by the collective imagination of New York.
Medvedev will play in the semifinals of the U.S. Open on Friday, a result that seems at once inevitable and improbable. In the third round of the tournament, this past week, he faced Feliciano López, and he appeared exhausted, and on the brink of defeat. This was understandable: after reaching three consecutive finals since the start of August, at tournaments in Washington, Toronto, and Cincinnati, he had played more singles-tennis matches in the month than anyone on the tour. And it wasn’t just the number of matches but the manner in which he won them. He has said “my tactic is to make my opponent suffer” by prolonging points, but often he seems to be the one hurting the most. After the semifinal in Cincinnati, against Novak Djokovic, Medvedev said, “Every tough exchange we had, I thought, O.K., I’m going to fall down. That’s it. The match is finished.” He won in three sets.
Still, he had struggled physically in his second-round match, against Hugo Dellien, and, against López, he really did appear to be at the end of his rope. His footwork was a mess. At one point, he angrily snatched a towel from a ball boy, incurring a code violation and the wrath of the crowd. Soon after, he gave the middle finger to the ump, which was caught on the big screen in the stadium. This was not the first time that Medvedev has acted like a clown, or worse. He was once defaulted from a match for implying that the chair umpire favored his opponent because both both the umpire and his opponent were black. After a loss at Wimbledon, he threw coins at the umpire’s chair. This past year, after a match in Miami, he appeared to challenge Stefanos Tsitsipas to a fight. His therapist now watches his matches from Medvedev’s box.
Against López, the rage worked, one way or another. Medvedev won the match, and, as the boos rained down, he thanked the crowd. “Your energy tonight give me the win,” he said, punctuating his words with hand gestures that were both operatic and sarcastic. “Because, if you were not here, guys, I would probably lose the match, because I was so tired, I was cramping yesterday, it was so tough on me to play. So I want all of you to know, when you sleep tonight, I won because of you.”
Then he ignored the on-court interviewer’s next question to repeat himself. “Again, the only thing I can say, the energy you’re giving me right now, guys, I think it will be enough for my five next matches. The more you do this, the more I will win, for you guys.” He threw back his head and opened his arms in triumph, soaking in the scorn.
At his press conference after the match, he was chastened. “I was an idiot, to be honest,” he said. “I did some things that I’m not proud of and that I’m working on to be a better person on the court, because I do think I’m a good person out of the court.” But when, during his fourth-round match, the crowd turned against him again, he fed off their derision once more. After defeating Dominik Köpfer in four sets, he danced his way to the on-court interview. “Again, today I was losing, 6–3, 2–0,” he began. “I was painful in my adductor before the match; I thought, I’m not going to play. I was painful in my shoulder. I took as much painkillers as I could. You guys being against me, you gave me so much energy to win, thank you!”
By then, Medvedev had become the antihero of the tournament, a viral sensation. In the quarterfinals, he faced Stan Wawrinka, and he walked onto the court to a chorus of boos. They sounded softer this time, though—it’s hard to sustain a W.W.E. atmosphere at a tennis match, even in New York. The outrage, by then, was mostly in fun; many people in the stands probably didn’t even know how it had started. And Medvedev had again taken steps to change people’s perception of him. He posted heart emojis on Instagram. He took responsibility for his faults. “I got what I deserved,” Medvedev said of the boos after his match against Wawrinka. “Usually I’m not like this, as I was in the third-round match. I’m not proud of it. I’m working to be better. Hopefully I can show the bright side of myself.”
But more interesting than Medvedev’s inconstant persona were the shades and shadows of his game. His shots are flat and a little odd—one moment soft and angled, the next sent hard to the back of the court. He has a big first serve, and a big second serve—sometimes. He does not allow his opponents to get in rhythm. And the worse he is feeling, the more creative he seems to get. Against Wawrinka, he appeared, at several moments, to be in great pain. He called the trainer out to tape his quadriceps. He called the trainer out to cut off the tape. He hit nine double faults—in just the first set. He appeared, for entire games, barely to try to reach balls that landed at any real distance from him. He won the match 7–6 (8), 6–3, 3–6, 6-1. He was magnificent.
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Wawrinka, meanwhile, looked confused and tentative. Later, it was reported that he was suffering from the flu, but Medvedev’s game surely had something to do with how lost he appeared. Normally a crowd favorite, Wawrinka seemed incapable of summoning any inspiration. At one point, he spread his palms in front of him and looked to the sky in a gesture of despair. “The way I won was quite ugly,” Medvedev acknowledged afterward, “because that’s what I had to do.”
He added, “Of course, I would prefer to win in a normal way, with a normal tennis game. But that’s how I won.”
In the semifinals, Medvedev will face Grigor Dimitrov, who defeated Roger Federer in the quarter-finals. By all accounts, Dimitrov is one of the kindest men on the tour. For a long time, he was compared to Federer, because his strokes so closely resemble Federer’s. But being an heir apparent to a legend is an impossible role. Dimitrov never won the Grand Slam titles he seemed destined for. He came into the tournament with a 1–7 record in his last eight matches; he is ranked No. 78 in the world. But he still has a beautiful game—a dancer’s footwork, an unfurling one-handed backhand, an easy and eerily familiar service motion. He still looks like a prince.
Medvedev, of course, as is becoming customary, will be in the role of usurper. He may try to be good. He may show New York his bright side, as he says that he wants to do. But, even more than that, he wants to win. So he will try to make Dimitrov suffer. He will suffer, too, whether he loses or, perhaps especially, if he wins.
A previous version of this piece incorrectly described a match between Medvedev and Djokovic in Cincinnati.
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