MELBOURNE – Daniil Medvedev used his racket to smash a tiny camera attached to the net at the Australian Open while he was trailing in his first-round match in the main stadium on Tuesday.
The No. 5-seeded Medvedev was the 2021 U.S. Open champion and is a three-time runner-up at Melbourne Park, including a year ago. He was not playing his best against Kasidit Samrej, a wild-card entry from Thailand who is ranked 418th and making his Grand Slam debut.
The camera-destroying racket swings happened in what would be the last game of the third set, which Samrej claimed to take a two-sets-to-one-lead in the best-of-five match.
Medvedev lost a point and went up to the net, then brought his racket forward with full force no fewer than four times, making contact with a small black camera that shattered, sending pieces flying.
Medvedev received a warning from the chair umpire. Soon enough, Medvedev had dropped that set, leaving him with plenty of work to do to avoid a massive upset in his first match of the 2025 season.
Samrej was trying to become the lowest-ranked man to eliminate one of the top five seeded players at a Grand Slam tournament since the ATP’s computerized rankings began in 1973, according to the International Tennis Federation.
The biggest such result entering Tuesday was when No. 234 Alex Kim beat No. 4 Yevgeny Kafelnikov at the 2002 Australian Open.
Samrej earned his way into this year’s Australian Open bracket by going through four rounds of a wild-card playoff for the Asia-Pacific region in November. He had never played against someone ranked higher than 78th until Tuesday and never beaten anyone ranked higher than 157th.
Samrej got treatment from a trainer because of a problem with his left leg late in the fourth set, which Medvedev grabbed to force the match into the fifth.
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