Daniil Medvedev, who was the No. 1 player on the ATP as recently as 2022, and to me, the most compelling persona in men's tennis, is in the midst of a career freefall. With Sunday's first-round loss at the U.S. Open, he has continued to plummet. But Medvedev nearly turned around that match, due to the intervention of an oblivious photographer at the U.S Open, in one of the strangest scenes the tournament has ever seen.
You'd be forgiven if you went to bed at a reasonable hour last night: Medvedev was playing listless tennis and found himself down match point against world No. 51 Benjamin Bonzi, the man who had just upset him in the first round of Wimbledon. The score was 6-3, 7-5, 5-4, advantage Bonzi, who had just missed his first serve and was preparing to hit a second. In between serves, a photographer inexplicably emerged from the photo pit and scurried onto the court. (Presumably, he thought the match was already over.) Umpire Greg Allensworth used his microphone to tell the photographer to retreat. That noise, along with the actual act of the photographer running onto the court during live play, delayed the match for a few seconds. By the rulebook, the umpire has discretion to award a player a fresh first serve in these situations.
Either Bonzi would have had to play through a bizarre interruption, or Medvedev would have had to face a "second" first serve. Either way, one player was going to find the umpire's ruling unpleasant; Allensworth picked the latter path. And when Daniil Medvedev finds something unpleasant, he makes it known to everyone in the vicinity.
Medvedev thought it was too brief an interruption to warrant a fresh first serve, and he berated Allensworth at length, asking the umpire why he was "shaking," and referencing the time that fellow player Reilly Opelka slammed Allensworth as the worst umpire on tour. "He wants to go home, guys. He doesn't like to be here," Medvedev said of Allensworth, directly into the camera. "He gets paid by the match, not by the hour."
Medvedev's meltdown was prolonged, nasty, and worthy of several code violations, though he received none. Less nasty, and more purely hilarious, was the way Medvedev proceeded to rile up the crowd in his defense. They went on to boo and jeer for nearly six minutes, halting play. Medvedev off the court is a funny and charismatic figure, but as I've explored at length, at many junctures in his career he has used this same humor and charisma on the court in wicked ways.
One point away from victory, Bonzi was put on ice. Several times during that span, Bonzi tried to step to the baseline to serve, but was overwhelmed by the sheer crowd noise and retreated. Medvedev even tried to calm them down at times during those six minutes, but he had already worked them into a froth. And the crowd at the U.S. Open, past a certain hour, is basically all beery froth.
After order was restored, Bonzi missed that first serve he'd been awarded; the crowd cheered as loud as they had all evening. Medvedev went on to win the tiebreak in that third set, and made heart gestures toward the crowd. He won the fourth set, 6-0, as Bonzi appeared to be lagging physically. And when Medvedev broke serve in the fifth set, it appeared that the whole match had swung around the pivot point of that photographer foray. (That photographer was escorted out of the stadium after the third set, and later had his credential revoked, the USTA confirmed to journalist Ben Rothenberg.)
Somehow, Bonzi did hold on to win the match. He even shook hands with Medvedev after; plenty of players would not have shown him that much grace. Medvedev had recently switched to a new Tecnifibre racquet—or at least a new paint job on those racquets, since players often keep their trusted old models underneath paint that suggests they're using their sponsor's newest products. In any case, he destroyed them while seething on the bench and packing his bags. This type of first-round loss would have been difficult to envision back in 2021, when Medvedev won the Open, defeating Novak Djokovic and flopping onto the court in a dead-fish celebration inspired by a soccer video game. He entered this 2025 tournament as the No. 13 seed, and left it in ruins.
Despite being one of only three players on tour who have defeated both of the current hegemons, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, at the majors—and, in my assessment, one of the few with the talent to continue doing so, sporadically—Medvedev will end the 2025 season with one win across all four majors. That sole victory was at the Australian Open, when he beat Kasidit Samrej, a Thai wildcard then ranked No. 418 in the world. Even at the U.S. Open, a tournament he loves, Medvedev found no traction. In press afterward, he did express his appreciation for the crowd that booed him back into the match: "Heart emojis! I love them, I love New York." That's all well and good, but I have a related question: Will Medvedev ever love professional tennis again under the Sincaraz regime?
