US Open 2026 pages
Sports · US Open 2026 · Men's Singles · Round of 64
Daniil Medvedev vs 
Sebastian Gorzny
Round of 64
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
My pick: Daniil Medvedev to advance · locked 2026-08-31 20:50 UTCPrediction
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.
Tale of the tape
Player vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-08-31.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-08-31.
The briefing
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.
Watch: Second-round coverage runs across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC, with ESPN Deportes in Spanish — and every court streams in the ESPN app, which is where a match away from the two show courts will live. (ESPN press-room release and listings, as of 2026-08-27)
Court & schedule: Not yet assigned. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before, and this match has not reached the board yet. (Official US Open order-of-play release cadence, as of 2026-08-31)
Weather: Rain is the story of the week's opening, and it is forecast to get worse before it clears. Showers and thunderstorms are likely overnight — 72% under a low near 72°F — and Tuesday is the worst day on the board: near 81°F with storms likely through the day, 67%, and again after dark at 64%. Wednesday is the break in it, near 76°F on a 26% chance of showers, with a slight chance of storms returning overnight; Thursday is warm and unsettled again, near 84°F on 53%. Friday is the first clean day of the fortnight — near 82°F and mostly sunny after an early 15%. Ashe and Armstrong close their roofs and play on; everything else waits. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-08-31)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.
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 32