SYDNEY, January 18. /TASS/. Russia’s top tennis player Daniil Medvedev was able to make it into Round 3 of the 2024 Australian Open after coming back from two sets down to defeat Finland’s Emil Ruusuvuori on Thursday.
The marathon match, which lasted more than four hours and twenty minutes, saw Medvedev eventually walk away victorious after a grueling five sets (3-6; 6-7; 6-4; 7-6; 6-0.) against his Finnish opponent.
"It was tough. I think the only two matches when I went two-sets-to-love down and won, it was here, on this court," the official website of the Association of Tennis Professionals quoted Medvedev as saying in his on-court interview. "So that’s a good memory for sure."
"It was not easy to start the match and in the first set I was missing too much. I was missing all over the place," Medvedev continued. "Then I [changed my racquets] and finally found one where I felt like I was playing better. Sometimes it is just something you create in your mind.
"I stayed with this racquet. I started with it at the beginning of the third set and stayed with it until the end of the match," he added.
The Russian tennis player’s next opponent is Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime, who defeated Hugo Grenier of France earlier in the day.
Medvedev, 27, is currently third in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Rankings List. In 2022, the top Russian racket was ranked the No. 1 tennis player in the world for 16 weeks. He is the 2021 US Open Champion and has 20 ATP tournament titles under his belt. He won five of these 20 titles just in 2023 alone. Also, in 2021, he won the Davis Cup as well as the ATP Cup playing for the Russian national team.
The 2024 Australian Open tournament is being played on hard courts at Melbourne Park on January 14-28 and has a purse of $57.8 mln in prize money up for grabs. The opening tournament of the annual Grand Slam series in Australia marks its 112th edition this year. Serbia’s Novak Djokovic and Belarus’ Aryna Sabalenka are the reigning Australian Open champions in men’s and women’s singles, respectively.
Russian players’ neutral status at tennis tournaments
On February 28, 2022, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued recommendations to international sports federations to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from taking part in international tournaments, citing Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine as the reason.
Following the IOC’s recommendations in late February 2022, the majority of global sports federations decided to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from all international sports tournaments.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) ruled on March 1, 2022 to suspend the membership of the Russian and Belarusian national tennis federations while also cancelling all previously scheduled tennis tournaments in the two countries.
On March 14, 2022, the ITF also confirmed its prohibition of the Russian and Belarusian national tennis teams from the 2022 Davis Cup and 2022 Billie Jean King Cup.
However, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) allowed tennis players from Russia and Belarus to continue participating in WTA and ATP tournaments, but only under a neutral status.