Adam Walton Beats Medvedev in Five Sets at French Open — Walton Tennis
walton tennis turned into a breakout stage for Adam Walton, who beat Daniil Medvedev in the first round of the French Open in five sets. The 27-year-old’s first victory over a top 10 player also gave him his fourth win at grand slam level.
Walton and Medvedev in Paris
Walton finished the match with the kind of result that changes how a draw looks on paper. Medvedev, a former world No 1, fell in the opening round after Walton stayed in the contest long enough to pull it out across five sets.
“It's been pretty crazy,” Walton said a day after the win at Roland Garros. His phone has hardly stopped pinging in the past 24 hours, and he added: “There was a lot of media around the match and a lot of messages. It’s great to see them all, everyone reaching out. I haven’t had a chance to respond to all of them as I’m obviously still in the tournament, just trying to stay as locked in as possible.”
Home Hill and Brisbane
The result carries extra weight because Walton did not follow a standard junior path. He was born and grew up in Home Hill, a town of about 3,000 people 100km south of Townsville and around 1250km from Brisbane, and he started playing tennis at age five with his brother Jack.
“The tennis courts are inside a racetrack,” Walton said of the setup in Home Hill. He described the routine around lessons this way: “In the mornings before our lessons, we would have to wait for the horses to be on the other side of the racetrack before you could open the gate, drive through, and close the gate, so they wouldn’t get spooked.”
He moved to Brisbane as a 14-year-old on a boarding school scholarship, later went to the University of Tennessee and won the NCAA doubles title in 2021. Walton broke into the top 100 in 2024 after describing himself as “a bit of a late bloomer.”
Walton's grand slam climb
He said he was never a good junior and never played any junior slams or European junior trips. “Had I not gone to college, I don’t think I would have been able to continue with my tennis,” Walton said, pointing to the route that kept his career alive long enough to reach this point.
That path now has him with just over US$2m in career earnings, almost half of it coming from the four majors. Walton said the short-term target is to be in the main draw of each grand slam, and this win gives him another result to build from after his first top-10 scalp at one of the sport’s biggest stages.
