MELBOURNE, Australia – For seven hours Friday afternoon, the Australian Open turned into an American tennis trout farm.
It was almost impossible to watch a singles match without seeing a red, white and blue flag on the scoreboard as two early 20-somethings and a teenager who looked even younger than his 19 years thundered through the men’s draw to win the second went into a week. .
Did anyone have two guys from Orange County, Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen, reach the round of 16?
They didn’t.
“I was down a set and a break in the first qualifying round,” said Tien, the teenager in the group, after dusting France’s Corentin Moutet in three sets. “To be in the second week now feels a bit crazy,” he added.
Michelsen had gotten there first and had knocked out No. 19 seed Karen Khachanov in three sets.
Wins for US women included all this, with Emma Navarro reaching the second week with her third straight three-set victory to start the day. Madison Keys came there to close out the night, beating friend, compatriot and Australian crowd favorite Danielle Collins.
That was all a little less surprising. Keys and Navarro have been there before, as has Coco Gauff. Tommy Paul’s best Grand Slam result came in Australia when he reached the semi-finals in 2022, and he joined Gauff, Keys and Navarro with a routine victory over Roberto Carballes Baena the day before. Paul and Gauff then kept the American mojo rolling even further, winning their fourth-round matches against Alexander Davidovich Fokina and Belinda Bencic.
Tien, 19, and Michelsen, 20, who will try to keep the atmosphere alive in Melbourne on Monday, are experiencing a surge that is the opposite of that. Michelsen is on form from the past: he made it to the third round in Melbourne last year and he’s won a couple of first-round matches at the US Open in the past two years – but not like this, with two top-20 finishes defeated players in three games. competitions.
Tien, a two-time national junior champion, had played two Grand Slam main draw matches before this week, a four-set loss to Arthur Fils at the 2024 US Open and a three-set loss to Tiafoe the year before. The third time was the charm. He defeated Argentina’s Camilo Ugo Carabelli in five sets
Then the draw gave him two matches against the arch-enemies of the ATP Tour, less a baptism of fire than a mind-boggling trip full of swirling shots, tantalizing spins and the dark arts of tennis with the big boys. Ten took on fifth seed Daniil Medvedev for five sets and nearly five hours in a match that ended not long before dawn. Then came Moutet, who reminded Tien after two sets that he still had to win a third, who played Moutet at some points as if he were hobbling through a hip injury, while at others he clambered around the court at full speed. Interesting times for a Grand Slam newcomer.
“I didn’t really know what was going on with him,” Tien said at his press conference, still with one foot in the washing machine.
Add to that Ben Shelton’s four-set victory over Lorenzo Musetti, the Italian who had beaten him two out of two times, and a remarkable statistic emerges: this is the first Grand Slam since 1993 to feature three American men under 23 in the second week. Tien and Michelsen are also the first pair of American men aged 20 or younger to reach the third round at a Grand Slam since the 2003 US Open, when Andy Roddick and Robby Ginepri, Michelsen’s coach, did so.
It was America’s two most recent grand finalists, Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula, who found the fourth round a bridge too far. Gael Monfils produced four flawless sets to eliminate Fritz; Olga Danilovic produced two to eliminate Pegula.
Yeah, it’s a bit weird. But maybe it is explainable.
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In mid-November, Michelsen and Tien were beaten up. The two good friends, who play Fortnite together in their spare time and have trained at the same tennis academy in Orange County for the past four years, had just finished long seasons. They had the usual menu of sore joints from hitting too many balls for too long.
They didn’t boot the console.
“They basically put the rackets down for two weeks and went to work,” Rodney Marshall, the Southern California tennis fitness guru who has worked with Michelsen for the past year, said Saturday during an interview from Los Angeles.
Everyone calls Marshall ‘Rocket’. He is one of those sports torture experts that American tennis players have trusted for fifteen years to make them faster, stronger and more durable.
Marshall, Michelsen and Tien worked together twice a day, six days a week at the California academy where they have trained together for the past four years – and on the sands of Aliso Beach, California.
They only had a small window and had to figure out what kind of additional profits they could make. They wanted to gain lower body strength and refine their movements so they could get in and out of the corners of the field faster – an essential skill these days.
Tien, who had missed three months in the first half of the year due to a broken rib, needed a little more strength from his left leg – his back leg on the forehand – to maximize the power he could unleash from his 180cm leg. frame. Michelsen, who is 6-foot-4, had to get better at lowering his center of gravity and finding power from a crouched position.
Life became an endless series of isometrics and plyometrics. The isometrics (holding positions for long stretches) strengthens muscles and tendons; plyometrics (jumping) builds explosiveness.
On Saturday they went to the beach to do sprints. Marshall brought an American football and sent them on passing routes across the dirt, with one acting as a wide receiver and the other as a cornerback.
“It was almost like they were cramming,” he said of Tien and Michelsen. “They really embraced suffering.” If this phrase sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for it: four-time Grand Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz, 21, found “joy in suffering” for his French Open title last June.
Tien soon gained some momentum when he hit a tennis ball down the line. Michelsen became confused and told Marshall he could stay there all day. “I love it here,” he shouted.
“It’s a constant battle every day,” Michelsen said in an interview after his third-round win over Khachanov, his second win over a seed in six days.
“I look at Marin Cilic. He was like 6-6, and he was always so low. I tried to reproduce that.”
Alex Michelsen’s explosiveness from the ground was key to his run in Melbourne. (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
On the other side of the country, in Florida, Paul himself completed a fitness block with Fritz before he headed to Southern California for tennis training. Frances Tiafoe, Reilly Opelka, Jacob Fearnley and several other pros were in Florida with Paul.
“A good group,” said Paul, who often talks to Michelsen about the NFL and NBA in the locker room. “He’s an insanely good competitor,” he said of Michelsen.
Paul said during an interview on Friday that he is determined to play matches on his terms in 2025. He wants to move other people this season, and not be the one who gets moved so much. That always seemed to happen last year when he ran into Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. His fast front foot tennis could hurt them for a while. He won a set against Alcaraz at Wimbledon and was 4-1 ahead of Sinner at the US Open. But then they would force him behind the baseline and take him out of the game.
“Carlos moves incredibly well when he needs to, but if you watch him when he’s playing his best tennis, he’s dictating,” Paul said.
Shelton was in Orlando doing his own thing. He was trying to figure out how to go from a below-average returner to someone who can get free points for his serve while keeping other guys from getting free points for theirs.
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From early Friday morning, when Tien defeated Medvedev in a match that ended at 2:56 a.m., to sunset on Saturday, when Shelton defeated Musetti in a fourth-set tiebreak, the 23-and-under trio showed that the training was worth it .
Ten arrived back at his hotel after four in the morning. He ate cold, stale pizza and didn’t fall asleep until just before seven o’clock. He slept until about 2.30pm before returning to Melbourne Park, where he actually hit tennis balls, stood still for 45 minutes and underwent five hours of massage and physiotherapy.
By eleven o’clock at night he was dead asleep. “That was desperately needed,” he said.
He then filleted Moutet and did to the French what Moutet had done to so many others over the years, without the dark art of delay and distraction.
“Incredible effort from him today,” Tien’s coach, Eric Diaz, wrote in a text message. “The body wasn’t doing well. Impressive mental rebound too.”
Student Tien’s courtship has tied his opponents in knots. (Daniel Crockett/AFP via Getty Images)
Shelton also had some rebounding to do. He had watched his two defeats to No. 16 seed Musetti over and over again, reliving the Italian rolling a series of backhand passes over the line. With the score tied at 5-5 in a fourth-set tiebreaker, Shelton hit a terrible drop shot that offset Musetti’s fearsome running backhand. The point seemed lost, but Shelton knew what to expect. He covered the line, volleyed into the open court and served out the match.
He had been watching the other games all afternoon, especially Michelsen.
“Me and Alex are guys,” Shelton said at his press conference.
“I texted him and told him he’s a dog after every competition he won because it’s true. He’s a dog. He will rise to the top of the game very quickly.”
With Shelton watching, Michelsen effectively sealed his victory over Khachanov with three huge points in the second set tiebreak. They all had their roots in the offseason training block. He won the first with a 170 km/h second serve, a product of leg power and jumps. He took the second after sprinting for a ball outside the tram lines and swinging a forehand down the line. He won the third with his bread and butter, a powerful backhand down the line – with a little extra pop from all those medicine ball throws with Marshall and Tien.
As for Ten, Shelton sees a kindred spirit in his fellow southpaws, despite their diametrically opposed styles. Tien is all about changing pace, floating balls deep into the backcourt and then suddenly attacking. His tennis is nothing like Shelton’s frontal attack, but Tien breaks through here out of nowhere, two years after Shelton did so on the same courts.
“Not a bad place for a breakthrough,” Shelton said. “In addition to all the guys who are already at the top in the US, there are many more to come. It’s really starting to manifest itself now.”
Indeed it is. Trout farming, a lot easier to set up in a prosperous country with more than 300 million inhabitants, does what it should do. There were 33 Americans in the singles draws, more players than any other country. As the tournament reaches the quarter-finals, two have already reached a safe haven and four more may be on the way.
Now comes the hard part: breaking the tape at the finish, as Gauff did 16 months ago in New York. This does not require a trout farm. It takes a unicorn – and there are no farms that can produce it.
(Top photo: Peter Staples / ATP Tour)