MELBOURNE, Australia — Learner Tien, a 19-year-old qualifier from California, notched the biggest upset of the 2025 Australian Open to date by beating No. 5 seed and 2024 finalist, Daniil Medvedev, in five sets.
Tien won 6-3, 7-6(4), 6-7(8), 1-6, 7-6(10-7), in a match that lasted just shy of five hours. It ended just before 3 a.m., with one very familiar character and another playing the second five-set Grand Slam match of his career.
For Medvedev, the match is the latest setback in a year that started to go sour when he was two sets up on Jannik Sinner in the 2024 final. Losing to Tien, a massive underdog who only won his first Grand Slam main-draw match two days ago, is the ultimate stunner. Before this year, Tien had only played seven ATP Tour matches, not including December’s Next Gen Finals, an event for the best eight players under 20 that plays first-to-four-game sets.
He hardly fits the profile of the new generation of potential men’s tennis stars who have captured this year’s Australian Open, like Joao Fonseca and Jakub Mensik. They are mostly tall and arrive with big serves and frozen-rope groundstrokes. Tien is a hair under six feet, slight with a cherubic face. But he has a steady, unwavering demeanor, deceptive power that he generates with terrific footwork and enough courage to take big cuts at the ball when he needs to.
All of that was on display Thursday night and then past midnight Friday morning. Tien flustered Medvedev all night, driving him to desperation in a contest of two players not particularly disposed to getting onto the front foot. In a game of chess, Tien broke down Medvedev’s opening and middle game. By early in the third set, Medvedev was trying to serve and volley, hitting two first serves, grasping at any tactic that might get him back into the match.
Midway through, he broke Tien’s serve and had the opening to begin one of his trademark turnarounds when Tien missed two easy balls and looked like he might have missed his moment. But Tien broke Medvedev right back in a game that Medvedev started from a point down after receiving a penalty from the chair umpire for threatening to strike a ball at an official in anger.
In a career marked by strange incidents and tournaments, this was Medvedev’s oddest one. He didn’t arrive in Australia until just before the start of the tournament, opting to stay at home in Europe for the birth of his second child.
His first-round opponent, a Thai player named Kasidit Samrej ranked world No. 418, stretched him to five sets. Then came Tien, who had also needed five sets to advance to the second round. In a match of at times endless rallies between the Medvedev forehand and Tien backhand, it was the American who was more willing to change the direction down the line and to inject pace into the rally. Medvedev, nicknamed “The Octopus” for his tentacular court coverage and ability to scramble opponents into long rallies, found himself on the other end of his own playbook.
Tien came ready for all of Medvedev’s tricks and spins, and he brought a few of his own, plus a willingness to run down every ball he could possibly get his racket on. He turned the third-set tiebreak with a deep backhand to the back corner, at the end of one of those marathon points that Medvedev always seemed to win until that defeat to Sinner last year from two sets up.
Tien brought up one match point and Medvedev slammed down an ace. At 8-8, Tien put himself into his backhand corner ready for another forehand-to-backhand exchange, leaving his left side of the court open wide as he had done most of the night and early morning. Medvedev speared a forehand in the target and took the set on the next point. He then seized the opportunity as Tien ruminated on what might have been, jumping all over the American in a fourth set that lasted a little over 20 minutes.
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Tien is part of a wave of upstarts who have stormed the men’s tournament, registering big upsets and showing where tennis might be headed. Tien and his training partner and friend, Alex Michelsen, Mensik and Fonseca. Their victims have included several of the big names of the sandwich generation — those players now in their late 20s, caught between the Big Three and the young 20-somethings Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. Michelsen beat Stefanos Tsitsipas. Fonseca beat Andrey Rublev. Mensik beat Casper Ruud. Tien was coming for Medvedev.
After trading breaks in the deciding set, the match settled back into its old pattern. Medvedev maneuvered Tien around the court, but refused to come in with the American stretched and allowed him to slice awkward balls back into the court. At 4-5 on Medvedev’s serve, only a lunging backhand stab volley executed with his back to Tien saved him from going match point down for the second time. They played two more points, then, after 261 minutes of tennis, rain.
At 2:29 a.m, the roof closed.
The truly ridiculous thing is that Medvedev has done all this before, playing into the pre-dawn hours last year on the way to setting that record for the most court time in one tournament in Grand Slam history.
After soft-balling his way through the fifth set, he emerged from the brief rain break firing, setting the tone with forehand down the line to get the first point, then pushing Tien around the court to grab two more and the decisive service break. He had his first true lead of the night, for about 200 seconds. Tien wasn’t done. He smacked his way into a deciding tiebreak.
When Tien missed two forehands long to go down 6-7 with Medvedev holding two points on serve, Medvedev seemed like he had the final surge. Instead, Tien pulled out one more. Medvedev left a volley too safe when he had control of the point and Tien passed him down the line to draw level. Another forehand down the line took him to 8-7 and Medvedev finally had nothing left. A backhand wide and a forehand long, and after four hours and 49 minutes Tien was jogging to the net for the handshake at 2:56 a.m.
Medvedev was done. Another upstart was moving forward.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
