Giant with an agile foot: Medvedev, the ultimate embodiment of the modern player

First, let’s sweep aside the hasty conclusions and the worn-out certainties. Yes, tennis – and that’s what makes it great – will always offer a chance for all builds. The presence at the Masters of Diego Schwartzman (1.68 m), the smallest player to invite himself to the masters table since the American Harold Solomon who had qualified several times between the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, has come once again to prove it. Just like the hatching at Roland Garros of Hugo Gaston (1.73 m), whose delicious touch of the ball and the quality of return reminded us that a few grams of finesse would always be welcome in this rough world.

But we must not hide the truth either: tennis, like the human species, continues to grow. Especially elite tennis. In 30 years, the average height of the men’s top 50 has grown to over 5 centimeters to stand today at just over 1.88 meters. Which is slightly above what many agreed until then to consider the ideal height of the tennis player (around 1.85 m), that of the greatest champions like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal or Pete Sampras .

But now, the arrival of a string of giants near the summit shakes our certainties on this supposed “sweetspot” of the high ceilings. Because Daniil Medvedev, 1.98 m under the gauge, is far from being an isolated phenomenon. He landed in the wake of Alexander Zverev, who himself took the wheel of players like Marin Cilic or Juan Martin Del Potro (all at 1.98 m also), the latter having become at the US Open 2009 the most “great” Grand Slam winner in history. Besides that they are all the same size, these players have in common a solidity in the exchange and a psychomotor coordination much superior to the a little clumsy idea that we tended to have, wrongly, people. flirting with the double meter.

An idea also perpetuated by observation of the past. Going back to Frenchman Yvon Petra (1.96m), winner of Wimbledon in 1946, to a player like Richard Krajicek (also 1.96m), who succeeded him half a century later, all the giants of the games used to rely on the advantages conferred by their size, namely power and angular openness when striking. So by shortening the chain as much as possible. Which ultimately gave the impression that they weren’t able to do anything.

Marc Rosset: “The grown-ups have finally found the parade”

One of the first to move the lines was perhaps the Swiss Marc Rosset (2.01 m), who first distinguished himself on clay, where he won the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and obtained his best result in Grand Slam, at Roland Garros, where he reached the last four in 1996. If Rosset was certainly renowned for his frightening service, he did not disdain, him either, long-term exchanges.

“But it’s also because I had been trained on clay. After that, things changed and at the end of my career, I was more efficient indoors”, recalls the Genevan, for whom tennis players are subjected to a natural Darwinism depending on the playing field offered to them. “The slowing of surfaces observed then favored the emergence of fairly small players. The older ones suffered, but they ended up finding the parade, also helped by the progress of physical preparation. If tomorrow, the ATP decides to re – speed up the game, you will see that the profiles will adjust again. “

This is the obvious, even a pleonasm: the change in playing conditions has led to a change in the ways of playing. Including among the big ones, even if the current champions the highest perched, Ivo Karlovic, Reilly Opelka (2.11 m) and to a lesser extent John Isner (2.08), remain on ultra-short lines. But with Medvedev, even more than with an Alexander Zverev – certainly the player who comes closest to it – the revolution has reached a milestone. Never had we seen a player so great to use at this point of the long line.

The figures largely confirm this. In the statistical reports at the end of the season, Daniil appears at the same time in the leading pack of the best servers (6th in the percentage of service games won, 7th in the number of aces), not far from all the “big ones”, and in the leading pack of the best receivers (3rd for the percentage of points scored on 2nd ball, 11th for the percentage of successful breaks), where we find all the references from the baseline. It is the only one to appear so well in these various categories a priori “contradictory”. Which shows the perfect synthesis he was able to make of his game.

Where Medvedev took this concept of ultimate compromise further than a Del Potro or a Kevin Anderson (first double meter to reach a major final, at the 2017 US Open) is that he is not only capable of holding long exchanges: he likes them, where the Argentinean and the South African, as successful as they are technically, remain players who seek to strike as soon as they can.

13.3% rally of more than 10 racket strokes

We want as proof this other statistic highlighted by the site Tennis Abstract, whose database reveals that 13.3% of rallies played by the Russian are played in 10 or more racket strokes. It’s huge, slightly higher than Nadal (13.2%), not far from Djokovic (13.7%). In the category of players over 1.95 m, current or past, it is in any case a world record (for example: Karlovic 1.2%, Krajicek 2.3%, Philippoussis 2, 9%, Isner 3.5%, Raonic and Querrey 4.1%, Anderson 5.8%, Berrettini 6%, Cilic 7.5%, Rosset 7.6%, Khachanov 9.9%, Del Potro 10.4 % …). And among these long-term exchanges, the man of the Rolex Paris Masters / ATP Finals 2020 double wins more than 52%. It might not look like that, but it’s consistent.

It also requires suitable qualities, mentally of course, but above all physically. “Daniil’s big strength is his ability to move exceptionally well for his size. In fact, he’s a tall one who runs like a little one”, sums up the former French player (now Monegasque) Jean-René Lisnard, founder in Cannes of the Elite Tennis Center, where Medvedev landed at the age of 17 (he is now 24) and where he met his trainer Gilles Cervara, with whom he will now continue to work independently.

A privatized structure in which he will also keep his physical trainer Eric Hernandez, who also played, a little more in the shadows, an essential role in his development. “When he arrived in Cannes, Daniil already had this natural ability to move well but muscularly, it was really not good, remembers the one who also took care of many footballers like Adil Rami or Rio Mavuba. With him, we insisted a lot on the work of the lower body. It is essential in tennis to resist movement constraints and find fluidity in the support. It is especially so for Daniil with his style of play. “

Zverev and field hockey

In essence, tennis requires qualities that are almost contradictory. Most of the activity happens at ground level, with the legs constantly strained, in all directions. But a lot of shots, and not the least important, are played over the head. In short, you have to have a very low center of gravity while being able to rise very high. Hello the puzzle … Hence the idea of ​​a suitable size in the form of compromise. And it is this compromise that seems to be rising today, in the wake of phenomena like Daniil Medvedev or Alexander Zverev.

The latter, in an interview with the New York Times, explained how playing football and field hockey at a younger age had helped him tremendously to stay exceptionally low on his legs for such a tall player. This is a point in common that he shares with Daniil Medvedev, whose physical trainer has a philosophy of development focused on multi-sports from an early age. “Still, he indicates, we often work with soccer balls and basketballs during our foot exercises. “

The work on the foot, we should not talk about it too much to Marc Rosset, who has “food” until indigestion when he was on the circuit. “In winter, it’s simple, I didn’t touch the racket: I only did physical work, very focused on explosiveness and little footwork.” His then executioner? Pierre Paganini, perhaps the world’s most renowned physical trainer, the man who also shaped the bodies of Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka.

The moral of the story is that the practice of a game based on movement is ultimately no more inevitable for the adults than offensive tennis is for the children. It’s all about knowing how to spot your own style, knowing both your strengths and weaknesses, and then doing the right job. And if Daniil Medvedev has a quality unanimously recognized, even before his racket, it is his intelligence, which instinctively guided him on the right path. And which has thus enabled him to progress in leaps and bounds.