Medvedev shelves the pickleball plan and looks like a top player again

Daniil Medvedev said a few days ago that he had been contemplating a switch to pickleball. On Sunday night he beat French qualifier Hugo Gaston 6-4, 6-2, 6-4 to reach the second round of the US Open, and the question came back to him on court.

“Unfortunately tennis takes too much energy and time. Otherwise I would do something else,” the No. 7 seed told Andrea Petkovic. “Maybe not exactly pickleball but I’d exchange tennis, sometimes tennis, sometimes something else. Unfortunately tennis is a full-time job. Until I’m, let’s say, 37 and a half, I will be happy to play tennis. And then let’s see what life brings me.”

The joke had a real summer behind it. Before Sunday, Medvedev had won one match since Wimbledon, where he led in every set of a third-round defeat to Jan-Lennard Struff.

He lost his opening match in Montreal to Botic van de Zandschulp, beat Marco Trungelliti in Cincinnati and then lost to Brandon Nakashima there after holding three match points, and went out in the first round at Winston-Salem last week to wild card Martin Damm.

A first round Medevedv could not afford to lose

New York had produced the same result twelve months ago, when Benoit Paire’s compatriot Benjamin Bonzi, ranked No. 51, beat him in the first round. That was one of only two defeats Medvedev has suffered to players outside the top 30 at this tournament in his career, from 26 such matches, and it left him needing to avoid back-to-back opening losses to Frenchmen.

Gaston, ranked No. 91 and through qualifying, had never beaten him.

The 2021 champion, who denied Novak Djokovic the calendar Grand Slam in that final, has now won 34 of his 42 matches at Flushing Meadows, the best record he holds at any major. He offered one other explanation for the improvement. He plays American wild card Sebastian Gorzny or Belgian Raphael Collignon next.