On the evidence of this year and last, tennis fans can pull out their 2027 diaries, flick through to late August and pencil in “Daniil Medvedev gets weird.”

One year on from his memorable, quotable and entirely indefensible meltdown in the first round of the U.S. Open, Medvedev, the 2021 champion in New York, used a changeover at a tuneup in Winston-Salem, N.C. to meditate on his career options and the nature of sports.

“Maybe I should start a career in pickleball,” Medvedev, the top seed at the Winston-Salem Open after taking a wild card, mused during a 7-5, 6-3 defeat to 22-year-old American Martin Damm.

“Not too late. Doubles … With Jack Sock,” he said, referring to the former pro who moved into pickleball after retiring from tennis and has won eight titles on the circuit. Sock, 33, also won four Grand Slam doubles titles in tennis and Olympic gold at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.

Medvedev was not done with his exploration of sporting possibility.

“Every sport on this planet is better, man,” he said, turning to the chair umpire.

“Even curling right now.” What a way to catch a stray.

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Medvedev, 30, is having the kind of season that might drive a player toward intrusive, existential thoughts — even before considering the fact that he is predisposed to them like few sports stars are. After a dismal first nine months of 2025, he split with longtime coach Gilles Cervara, and hired Thomas Johansson, the 2002 Australian Open champion.

The switch appeared to revitalize Medvedev, who showed signs of life toward the end of the year and started 2026 with a title at the Brisbane International. After their partnership ended, Cervara had used a Medvedevian image to explain why the eight-year relationship, which saw Medvedev win that U.S. Open title and reach world No. 1, had to end. In an interview with Tennis Majors, he said:

“The team around a player is like an engine—a complex machine that drives forward. When it runs at full power, you go fast. At some point the engine stops, but you don’t see it because the boat continues gliding. After a while, that energy is gone, and you’re stuck mid-sea, trying to restart that engine.”

Never change, Meddy 🤣@WSOpen pic.twitter.com/kpQy1Omyv2

— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) August 26, 2026

Medvedev’s engine appeared fully restarted by spring, when he reached the final of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, defeating Carlos Alcaraz along the way with a stunning display of hyper-aggressive tennis. In that final, he took a juggernaut-like Jannik Sinner to two tiebreaks.

Since then, things have been less consistent. In May, Medvedev reached the Italian Open semifinals, again losing to Sinner, but he took him to three sets. That came after being double-bageled 6-0, 6-0 by Matteo Berrettini at the Monte Carlo Masters, and before losing in the first round of the French Open to Australian wild card Adam Walton. Medvedev split with Johansson this summer, and is working with Kazakhstan’s Andrey Golubev for the U.S. hard-court swing.

He will arrive in New York — on the back of his latest journey into the surreal — for the one-year anniversary of one of his most evocative but also most concerning displays. Medvedev is one of the great talkers on the ATP Tour, a considered and cerebral news conference subject and interviewee who will speak his mind and provide genuine insight into what elite tennis players think about, from their opponents, to their own games, to — especially in Medvedev’s case — the quality of tennis balls.

His turn of phrase, from the immortal “you better shut your f––– up, OK?” to Stefanos Tsitsipas at the 2018 Miami Open, to “who are they? Illuminati?” when discussing roof closures at the 2024 Madrid Open, can be sparkling.

But he can also spiral from absurdity into petulance, anger and outright bad sportsmanship. So it was at the 2025 U.S. Open, when a photographer walked onto the court during Medvedev’s first-round match against Benjamin Bonzi of France. Bonzi was serving for a straight-sets win, and the photographer made his move between his first and second serve on match point.

Chair umpire Greg Allensworth ruled that he would get another first serve, and Medvedev went ballistic. While his outburst had some of his typical vaudeville — “what did Reilly Opelka say?” remains the great unanswered question in tennis — he also incited the crowd to boo and delayed Bonzi’s attempt to win the match by six minutes, and claimed that Allensworth wanted to leave because he got “paid by the hour.”

When the match resumed, Medvedev broke Bonzi’s serve and won the next two sets, but ultimately lost the match in five.

“They did the work. I didn’t do anything,” Medvedev said in his news conference. “The crowd did what they did without me asking them too much, and it was fun to witness.”

“Daniil started it. He put oil on the fire,” Bonzi said in his news conference.

Medvedev was fined $42,500 for the incident. He will receive no such sanction for his journey into the twilight zone in Winston-Salem, but he will return to New York once again inhabiting his role as the sport’s compelling, at-times unforgivable anti-hero.