MOSCOW, March 26. /TASS/. Russia’s top tennis player Daniil Medvedev has reached the quarterfinals of the 2024 Miami Open tennis tournament in the United States after breezing past Germany’s Dominik Koepfer on Tuesday.
In the Round of 16 match at the tournament in the US State of Florida, it took the Russian an hour and a half to take down Koepfer in straight sets 7-6 (7-5); 6-0.
Speaking about coming back from 4-0 down in the first set, Medvedev said after the match: "I think sometimes it happens, when you lose the first set the way he lost it."
"He played very good, probably was closer to winning it because of the 4/0 in the tie-break and when you lose such a set, especially when the points were tough, it brings your energy down," the official ATP website quoted Medvedev as saying on the court after the match against Koepfler.
"I knew I had to use that in the beginning of the second set. That’s why it was the most important and I managed to do it. Sometimes that happens, but the level was high today," he added.
Russia’s 3rd-seeded Medvedev is now set to face off in the quarterfinals of the tournament in Miami against the winner of the Round of 16 encounter between Chile’s Nicolas Jarry (22nd-seed) and Norway’s 7th-seeded Casper Ruud.
Medvedev, 28, is currently fourth in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Rankings. In 2022, the top Russian racket spent sixteen weeks as the number one player in the world. He is the 2021 US Open Champion and has 20 ATP tournament titles under his belt. He won five of these 20 titles in 2023. Also, in 2021, he won the Davis Cup as well as the ATP Cup playing for the Russian national team.
The 2024 Miami Open tennis tournament is classified as an ATP Masters 1000 event and a WTA (the Women Tennis Association) 1000 event. It is played on hard courts at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, between March 19 and 31 and offers some $9 million and $8.8 million in ATP and WTA competitions correspondingly.
Medvedev is the tournament's reigning champion in men’s singles and Petra Kvitova from the Czech Republic won last year's women's crown.
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 canceling 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.