Count Carlos Alcaraz among those hoping the late-night tennis matches come to an end in the near future.
The seven-time Grand Slam winner played the latest match in U.S. Open history earlier this month, a five-set quarterfinal loss to Ben Shelton which ended at 3:33 a.m. local time, in his first tournament back after a five-month absence with a wrist injury.
“It is too much,” Alcaraz told reporters on Thursday as he prepares to compete in the Laver Cup in London. “They are going to have to do something. I’m not saying 3:30, but (even) finishing at 12 is too late already.”
The Alcaraz-Shelton match marked the third time in the last five years that a U.S. Open record for latest match was broken.
This year’s U.S. Open also saw the latest match start in tournament history, when Sofia Kenin and Venus Williams began their first-round match at 12:13 a.m.
Alcaraz spoke adamantly about the negative effect these extraordinary late matches have on the winners going forward.
“For an athlete finishing at 3:30 in the morning, it means we had to leave the courts at 4:30, then back to the hotel,” the Spaniard said. “You don’t go to bed until 6:30 or 7 in the morning. To recover for the next match, the person you play has an advantage.
“It is a shame a match like this didn’t reach a lot of people because they have to go to bed, they have to work in the morning,” Alcaraz added. “If that match had started at 7 or 8 p.m., at the maximum finishing at 11, the stadium would have been packed. A lot had to miss it because of the schedule.”
It bears mentioning that Shelton won his next match against Frances Tiafoe to reach his first Slam final. However, he did eventually lose the final in four sets to No. 1 seed Alexander Zverev.
“I hear from a lot of people that it finishes too late, and then I say, ‘Okay, and your suggestion is?’ I don’t get anything,” USTA director Craig Tiley told SkySports in an interview during this year’s tournament.
The latest match in Grand Slam history was Lleyton Hewitt’s defeat of Marcos Baghdatis in the 2018 Australian Open, which concluded at 4:34 a.m. local time.
The French Open only started holding night matches in 2021, limiting it to one match in the session, while Wimbledon doesn’t encounter these problems due to an 11 p.m. curfew in accordance with a neighborhood ordinance.
–Field Level Media
