Us Open 2023 – Daniil Medvedev after his victory over Rublev: “I had a crisis of hypoglycemia, I was dizzy”

“Frankly, the heat and humidity in New York is inhumanexplained our consultant Alex Corretja, present on site. This match between Medvedev and Rublev is torture“. Neither of the two men will deny this state of affairs as the faces and bodies appeared marked despite a rather common playing time of 2h47. But to see the two men looking for their breath after each point, drawing as rarely for two marathon runners from the back of the court and sweating profusely on soaked polo shirts was enough to grasp the intensity of the phenomenon.

Appearing in front of the media more than two hours after his victory, Medvedev did not have to wait long to discuss the conditions. “Frankly, I could say so many thingshe attacked immediately. I don’t know if we could see it through the cameras but due to sweating and using our towels, my nose is peeling so much that I have no skin left. And it has nothing to do with the sun!“. In the locker room, he came across his crimson pal Rublev, too, by this match without a tail or a head.

“The worst is that we could have continued if it had been necessaryhe continued. We tell ourselves that we have nothing left in the engine but if the match continues, we end up finding this little extra thing. But the trick, I think we can say the dangerous trick, is to know how far we can go? Maybe we would have been in five sets and we would have struggled to recover the days after without any real consequences. Or maybe we would have known the situation of Yibing Wu in Washington who fell under the heat“.

The Chinese had collapsed, without consequence, under the weight of the humidity and the heat in the American capital. A few hours later, a spectator fainted on the Arthur-Ashe court at the very start of the match between Madison Keys and Markéta Vondroušová.

Medvedev did not have this misadventure but, afterwards, he had a real fright. This explains this long wait before being able to appear at a press conference. “There, it’s better, I’m just completely drainedhe explained. Right after the interviews, I went straight into an icy bath. My eyes were completely fogged up, I couldn’t see anything, especially with the adrenaline going down. In fact, I was all shaking“.

The rest is a passage in the locker room that he will remember. After this bath, the Russian changed but downright wavered. “I had an attack of hypoglycemiahe revealed. I was sweating, I got dizzy. I said to my team ‘please bring me something to eat’. I was sitting there, sweating like crazy. Well, it happens sometimes“.

He would have preferred to avoid it anyway. But, as often, Medvedev delivered with real sincerity. Yes, he would like that this kind of matches could not take place in such conditions. No, he has no miracle solution to offer. “Honestly, I don’t know what we could dohe advanced. We can’t stop the tournament for four days because it’s been like this for three, four days. It would destroy everything, the TVs, the ticket office. A bit in fact“Even shifting to a night-session looks like a dead end as the Sinner-Zverev also took place in a hostile climate.

Relaunched on the comparison with F1, the sport he loves, where the conditions can seem crazy, Medvedev admitted that it could look like it. But that, contrary to the euphoria of the pilots at the time of crossing the line, he had felt nothing but relief on his match point: “I was happy to win but I was unable to express anythinghe concluded. I was just like ‘let me go from there, sit down somewhere and think about the meaning of my life“.