A leading athlete welfare and injury prevention expert has broken down the challenges and risks that night session matches at the Australian Open present to players after Daniil Medvedev called for change.
At the Australian Open, the night session on Rod Laver Arena and Margaret Court Arena — the two most prominent courts — is scheduled to begin at 7pm each day.
Two night session matches are scheduled on each of these courts per day, with the lineup usually consisting of one women’s singles match and one men’s singles match.
The men’s match is often the second and final match of the night session, and given the best-of-five set format of men’s Grand Slam tennis, this has led to some extremely late finishes in Melbourne over the years.
The latest-ever Australian Open match finish was in 2008, with Lleyton Hewitt overcoming Marcos Baghdatis in a five-set third round contest at 4:34am — the second-latest finish time in tennis history.
Medvedev, a three-time Australian Open finalist, has been involved in some early morning Melbourne marathons, having beaten Emil Ruusuvuori at 3:40am in 2024 and lost to Learner Tien at 2:54am at last year’s event.
Earlier this month, Medvedev called for the night session on the two premier courts to start an hour earlier.
“I’m not against playing at night, don’t get me wrong, but starting the first match at 7pm is just asking for trouble,” said the former world No 1 and US Open champion.
“When you have one match of five sets, and both of them went for five for me, it is a bit too late to start at 7pm. They should be starting at 6pm.”
Stephen Smith, the founder and CEO of Kitman Labs — the world’s leading sports science and performance intelligence company — spoke exclusively to Tennis365 about the issues with playing tennis in the early hours of the morning.
“When you bear in mind their biological and circadian rhythms, having somebody try to have peak performance at a time when their body is normally used to being asleep… remember that these guys are extremely high-level athletes that are in bed earlier, promoting recovery and resting,” Smith began.
“The fact is that this is probably a bigger change for them than a normal human that might stay up a little bit later.
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“I think the toll on their body, the change for them in terms of their planning and preparation as well, because they’re not just going to walk into that without having prepared and planned for that, they’re going to have tried to adjust their body clock and schedule to get themselves ready for that.
“And that itself puts even more pressure and stress on these guys going into a tournament like this. And if they’re not planning and prepping like that, they’re putting themselves at risk of fatigue, et cetera.
“Decreases in coordination, decreases in motor control, reaction times — all of those things would potentially increase the likelihood of injury, or a decrease in performance, which is probably just as important. Obviously they’re going to the tournament to win.”
Smith also addressed whether there should be a limit as to how late matches can start, and also a cut-off time for play.
“Listen, it’s being done for TV purposes, right? And they’re trying to find the right balance from a fan engagement perspective,” Smith said.
“I think what we’d want to do was study some of the output and data coming from those matches and understand, are there changes in performance, or do we see differences in the types of results or outputs that come from those matches?
“Is the product that we’re getting in those night matches just as good as the product we’re getting in day matches? If the answer to that question is no, then I think you probably look at changing it. What we want is as good a competition as possible.
“And the other thing we’d want to look at is the number of injuries that result from that, or the number of players involved in those night matches that end up subsequently getting injured for the rest of the tournament. That would start to tell us about the knock-on impact of those night matches from a health perspective or a performance perspective.
“So I probably wouldn’t jump into saying we should stop them or there should be an exact time. I’d turn to the data and ask some better questions of it.”
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