Daniil Medvedev's 2025 season has been akin to a pressure cooker that was just waiting for the right moment to blow. Once the lid finally came off—when a rogue photographer stepped onto the court at Sunday night’s U.S. Open match, resulting in an extra first serve being handed to Medvedev’s opponent, Benjamin Bonzi—the chaos briefly seemed to revive him. But like most of his disappointing and puzzling 2025 campaign, the revival ended in failure, and the blast left only fragments of the player who won the U.S. Open four distant years ago.
The sequence is so absurd that you have to see it to believe it. The frustrations of another disappointing big match and the reality of facing match point devolved into a shouting contest with chair umpire Greg Allensworth. Medvedev kept repeating, “Are you a man?” as he stalled and summoned boos from the crowd like an experienced wrestling heel. He quipped that Allensworth is “paid by the match, not by the hour” and accused him of wanting to go home early. Medvedev’s outburst was the tennis equivalent of icing an NFL kicker by storming onto the field and refusing to let the referee spot the ball. And somehow, it worked. For six full minutes, Medvedev turned the interruption into a weapon and completely drove the crowd into a frenzy as they cheered in his favor for the ensuing two sets, which he won. Even though Medvedev later tried to calm the crowd down, they had been unleashed and were no longer cooperating.
“That helped me get back into the match,” Medvedev said. “It was a fun moment to live. I wasn’t upset with the photographer. I was upset with the decision.”
That’s who Medvedev has always been. He’s not just a tennis player; he’s a provocateur. He flipped off the fans at the 2019 U.S. Open, mocked them again in victory speeches at various points, and was booed in 2021 when he stopped Novak Djokovic’s bid for immortality by stopping the Serbian from achieving the calendar Grand Slam. And after Sunday night’s match, Medvedev conceded that he’d probably get fined for dragging up Reilly Opelka’s insult from earlier this year, when he famously called Allensworth “bush league.”
Medvedev often uses the crowd’s energy, positive or negative, to spur him on. But this time, it wasn’t enough to carry him to victory. After the comeback surge, his game collapsed in the final set. Medvedev blew multiple leads and lost the five-set match to world no. 51 Bonzi. (Medvedev currently sits at 13.) It’s not only the second straight major in which the French journeyman has knocked Medvedev out in the first round but also the third straight time Medvedev has lost his opener at a Grand Slam. He’s won just one Grand Slam match in 2025, after winning 18 in 2024.
For me, the lasting image of the match won’t be the six-minute interruption but instead the post-match scenes. They’re emblematic of Medvedev’s slipping grip on the sport’s top tier. Medvedev, the former world no. 1, tossed multiple rackets into the crowd, then sat quietly and slammed his lone remaining racket into a metal bench—over and over again. We’ve seen Medvedev shout obscenities and push cameras away before, but we’ve rarely seen this level of anger from him. His tirade against the umpire was fairly vintage Medvedev. But his post-match outburst seemed like a different version of him that we don’t see very often.
As the only player of his generation to have beaten one of the Big Three (Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal) in a Slam final, Medvedev once looked like their heir apparent. His 2021 U.S. Open win against Djokovic and two close five-set losses to Nadal in the 2019 U.S. Open and the 2023 Australian Open made him the obvious candidate to lead men’s tennis into its next era. But instead of seizing on that momentum, he’s only moved backward. Like so many of his peers, Medvedev has regressed, only to be leapfrogged by the kids. Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are well clear of him at this point, but even the likes of Ben Shelton, Jack Draper, and Lorenzo Musetti now sit ahead of him in the rankings. His 2025 season shows just how fleeting a place at the top of the sport can be. Medvedev’s lone Slam title will be immortalized for the Djokovic of it all and because he did ultimately achieve what contemporaries like Alexander Zverev and Stefanos Tsitsipas have not. But Medvedev’s legacy beyond that has been muddled with each puzzling loss. He’s a star who shined really brightly and reached the top, but he hasn’t had the staying power to maintain that level.
When Medvedev broke into the sport’s elite with his unorthodox forehand technique and highly consistent point-to-point play, he was tennis’s great unsolvable riddle. His first serve was dominant, his baseline rallying was relentless, and the combination of the two was suffocating. He didn’t have to be a natural volleyer or returner, as he could wear you down from deep in the court until you broke.
But as his baseline consistency has slipped and his serve has lost its accuracy, that formula doesn’t hold anymore. He’s searching for fixes and finding only cracks. Medvedev has always called himself a hard-court “specialist,” which made it easy to excuse his performance on clay and grass. Yet the North American hard court has betrayed him, too. He crashed out of an ATP 500 tournament in Washington, D.C., in July with a loss to Corentin Moutet (world no. 59), and in recent weeks he’s lost early on in the tournaments in both Toronto and Cincinnati to Alexei Popyrin (26) and Adam Walton (85), respectively.
“I'm playing bad and, in important moments, even worse,” Medvedev said Sunday night. “Everything. Serve, return, volley, whatever. Just need to play better, and I'm going to try to do it next year.”
For a player who’d made the second week of the U.S. Open for six straight years before his loss on Sunday, it’s another sign that his game has regressed. The New York crowd has always had a complicated give-and-take relationship with Medvedev, but you felt a sense that the two shared a mutual appreciation. It was a symbiotic relationship that seemed to help both parties, with Medvedev often performing well and the crowd, of course, enjoying a great showman.
“Heart emojis,” Medvedev said after the match when he was asked about the New York crowd. “I love them. Love in New York. They did the work tonight. They pushed me to come back into the match. I didn't do anything.”
There’s always been a thin line between eccentric and irascible in sports, and Medvedev has built his career by dancing right on it. The trolling interviews and the gleeful antagonism against the crowds all seemed genius and fun when he was winning. But when the results vanish, the same behaviors read differently. What once looked like true chaotic neutral behavior now risks seeming unhinged. And that shift might be the clearest sign of all that Medvedev’s persona is nearing a breaking point.
When Medvedev won his maiden Grand Slam in 2021, it appeared to be a stepping stone on the path of a glorious career. Now it just seems like an anomaly. Medvedev is still a spectacle, still the sport’s ultimate wild card, but his outbursts don’t really ignite anything anymore. The pressure cooker blew, and all that’s left is smoke and wreckage. He’s always doing the most—just not winning.
