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Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Round of 64
Daniil Medvedev vs Sebastian Gorzny — 6-1 6-3 7-5
| Daniil Medvedev✓ | 6 | 6 | 7 |
| 1 | 3 | 5 |
Final · Wednesday, September 2, 2026 · Round of 64
Result
Sebastian Gorzny's first Grand Slam ended two days after the best win of his life. The 22-year-old, ranked 731st and in the draw on the wild card he won at the USTA's American Collegiate Player Playoff in June after two seasons at Texas, had saved five match points to beat Raphaël Collignon in a fifth-set tiebreak on Monday, four of them serving at 5-6. On Louis Armstrong Stadium he took one game off the seventh seed in the opening set. Daniil Medvedev, the champion here in 2021 and the runner-up in 2023, hit fourteen aces and thirty-eight winners to Gorzny's fifteen, won eighty-seven per cent of his first-serve points and converted five of fourteen break points; Gorzny had one break point in the match and did not take it. He did lead 5-4 in the third set, and Medvedev needed the last three games to close it out in two hours and seven minutes. Medvedev next plays Jaume Munar or Arthur Rinderknech.
Rows the source hadn’t published are left off rather than guessed.
At this Stage
The Round of 64 is where a Grand Slam draw stops being a lottery and becomes a tournament. Sixty-four men's matches opened the bracket; thirty-two across Wednesday and Thursday halve what is left, and everyone still here has already won on these courts. Seeds who came through the first round now meet opponents carrying form rather than a ranking.
Round of 128
Round of 64
What we know now
Court: Louis Armstrong Stadium
Match length: 2:07
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
What I said beforehand
The preview, frozen before the first serve. Clearly dated, never rewritten — that's the deal that makes the pick worth anything.
Medvedev, and the only real question is how long it takes. The seventh seed opened with 6-4 6-2 6-4 over Hugo Gaston in 2 hours 17 minutes, faced exactly one break point all afternoon, hit ten aces to none and won 83% of his first-serve points — an untidy 39 unforced errors, but nothing that mattered. Gorzny is the story of the round and the numbers are brutal: world No. 731, in through the American collegiate wild-card playoff, 1–3 for the season before this week, and he needed 3 hours 58 minutes and eleven match points' worth of nerve to get past Raphael Collignon, saving four of them on his own serve and winning the deciding tiebreak 11-9. The ratings put this near 95–5 and that is roughly right: Medvedev has 364 career hard-court wins, Gorzny has one. What Gorzny does have is a serve that produced twelve aces and 59 winners under pressure, and nothing at all to lose. They have never played.
The case for Daniil Medvedev
95% to winMedvedev is the 2021 champion here, ranked No. 8 to Gorzny's 731, and has just played the cleanest match of the two by a distance — one break point faced across a straight-sets win. He is 6′6″, returns deeper than almost anyone in the draw, and a young server who has never faced this before is exactly the sort of opponent his game punishes. He also has three days of rest advantage in the legs after a two-hour opener against Gorzny's four-hour one.
The case for Sebastian Gorzny
5% to winGorzny has already produced the least likely win of the men's first round, and he did it from 2-5 down in a match tiebreak with the season on the line. He hit 59 winners and came to the net 61 times against Collignon, which is a shot-making profile rather than a hanging-on one, and at 22 he has no ranking to protect. Medvedev lost his opener here a year ago; the version of him that goes flat against a big hitter with no fear is not a hypothetical.
Both cases written 2026-08-31, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
My locked pick: Daniil Medvedev to advance ✓ RIGHT
“A former champion at No. 8 against the world No. 731, coming off a far cheaper opening win.”
Locked 2026-08-31 20:50 UTC — rendered verbatim from the pick ledger; never a fresher, hedged version
Tale of the tape
Player vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-02.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-08-31.
Storylines
- Medvedev faced one break point in his opener and won 83% of his first-serve points beating Hugo Gaston 6-4 6-2 6-4.
- Gorzny, world No. 731 and in via the American collegiate wild-card playoff, saved four match points in a twelfth game to force the deciding tiebreak and won it 11-9.
- That was Gorzny's first Grand Slam main-draw win; he is 1–3 on hard courts for the season against Medvedev's 364–132 career record.
- Gorzny's opener ran 3 hours 58 minutes across two days; Medvedev's took 2 hours 17.
- First meeting: the two have never played.
Head to head
They have never met at tour level.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-08-31.
Court & schedule: Louis Armstrong Stadium, Wednesday 2 September. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-01)
Weather: Sunday — the men's final, and the last match of the fortnight — is 78°F with showers and thunderstorms 95% likely, the wettest day of the two weeks and the one day that cannot be pushed back. Ashe closes its roof and plays on. It clears overnight: 20% Sunday night, 20% Monday, then dry and sunny from Tuesday. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-13)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.