It was a rough Australian Open for Russian tennis player Danill Medvedev, including financially. Medvedev, ranked No. 5 in the world heading into the tournament and the runner-up in last year’s edition, struggled against 418th-ranked Kasidit Samrej (a wild-card entry from Thailand) in his first match Tuesday and smashed his racket, damaging a net camera in the process. And that, and further incidents around his second match against Learner Tien, wound up being costly for him.
Despite that camera-smashing incident (which produced some funny ESPN commentary from John and Patrick McEnroe), Medvedev eventually edged Samrej in five sets (6-2, 4-6, 3-6, 6-1, 6-2). But he fell in five sets in the second round Thursday to 19-year-old American Tien (who won 6-3, 7-6 (7-4), 6-7 (8-10), 1-6, 7-6 (10-7)), and melted down on the court in the process, repeatedly complaining about the umpire’s calls, throwing his racket towards the advertising boards at one point, and apparently cursing out a fan in Russian. And after that match, which ended at 2:54 a.m. local time in Melbourne, he skipped the mandatory post-match press conference.
Those behaviors led to Medvedev being fined a total of $76,000 U.S., with that broken down as $10,000 for the first-round camera incident and $66,000 for the second-round incidents. And, considering that he only got $124,000 for his second-round exit, that was more than half of his tournament winnings. Of course, he made more than $6.5 million in winnings alone last year, so he can afford it, but this was still a no-good, very-bad Australian Open for him, and one of the highest fines in recent memory in tennis. (However, the maximum he could have been fined was $200,000, so this wasn’t as harsh as it could have been.)
Amusingly enough, Medvedev predicted after his first-round win that the camera smash wouldn’t cost him much. He said there “The camera was very, very strong, because my racket didn’t handle the damage, but the camera did. I was very surprised,” and “The fine is usually for breaking the racket, and the camera is going to cost some, but I don’t think Go Pro is that expensive.” And he was correct, at least relative to the fines he got for his second-round behavior. He’s far from the first tennis player to skip a mandatory press conference, but hefty fines for that are notable, as the numbers of players skipping those would certainly rise without significant penalties.
In another funny codicil to this, Tien had his own media-starring moment in the wake of his win over Medvedev. Australian commentator John Fitzgerald interviewed Tien on the court for almost five minutes (again, this match ended just before 3 a.m. local time), and that interview got very weird:
From strange non-question lines like “19-year-olds are not meant to be this good” (Tien got a laugh from the crowd with his appropriate response of “I don’t know what to say to that”) to “I used to live in Newport Beach so I know where you live, by the way,” and “Goodness me, that is an exceptional effort. You know, it is the first a five-setter has gone to a super tiebreak this year,” Fitzgerald didn’t acquit himself terribly well here. But he did get in one good question (around 1:10) about what Tien was thinking after a third-set loss on a tiebreak and during a lopsided 6-1 fourth set loss, and got an unexpected response: “Honestly, in the fourth set, I just had to pee so bad. So I was just trying to finish it up fairly quick.”
That’s at least the second surprising bathroom-related overshare from a player during this Australian Open. But it was both accurate and funny in this case. And, unlike Medvedev’s media-related antics, it’s unlikely to lead to a fine.
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