You might have heard that Daniil Medvedev has quite the streak going. He’s beaten eleven straight top-ten-ranked opponents in a row. The streak began in Paris last fall with victories against Diego Schwartzman and Alexander Zverev, continued with a perfect run in London, and crossed into double digits with a final-round ATP Cup dismissal of Matteo Berrettini. Number 11 was a straight-setter against Andrey Rublev in the Australian Open quarter-finals. He’ll go for 12 in his semi versus Stefanos Tsitsipas, with a potential 13th straight in a championship tilt with Novak Djokovic.
Eleven is pretty darn good. Since the mid-1980s, only six other players have managed that: Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Pete Sampras, Thomas Muster, and Ivan Lendl.
Medvedev and his streak is just at the fringes of that list, though. When we start digging deeper, we find some truly incredible accomplishments.
First off, the longest top-ten winning streak in this span belongs to Federer, who won 24 in a row between the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2005. (I found one online reference to a 26-win streak; I guess it’s possible I’m missing something or have some dates reversed, but I’ve double checked my data, and am sticking with 24.) Imagine Medvedev lasting another 52 weeks without losing to a top-ten opponent!
What truly amazes me, though, is not any individual streak. Federer strung together another 17 top-ten wins starting at Wimbledon in 2006, and if that isn’t enough, he ran off another 10-match streak in between the 24 and the 17.
Even Federer’s feats pale next to the rarely-interrupted dominance displayed by Djokovic. Novak, like Medvedev, once had an 11-match win streak against top-tenners. And that’s his seventh longest! Djokovic owns streaks of 17, 14, 14, 13, 13, 12, and 11. (For what it’s worth, he also has an active streak of 2. Could be the start of something big….)
Here’s the complete list of top-ten win streaks of at least 11 matches since 1985:
Streak Player Span 24 Federer 03 Masters Cup - 05 AO 17 Djokovic 15 WTF - 16 Rome 17 Federer 06 Wimb - 07 Dubai 14 Djokovic 12 Beijing - 13 IW 14 Djokovic 18 Wimb - WTF 14 Nadal 12 Miami - 13 Monte Carlo 13 Djokovic 11 AO - 11 Rome 13 Djokovic 13 Beijing - Davis Cup F 13 Nadal 05 Monte Carlo - 06 RG 13 Sampras 96 WTF - 97 Paris 12 Djokovic 15 IW - RG 12 Nadal 08 Monte Carlo - Toronto 12 Nadal 13 Madrid - USO 12 Lendl 87 Hamburg - Sydney Indoor 12 Muster 95 Davis Cup R1 - Essen 11 Djokovic 14 Paris - 15 Dubai 11 Medvedev 20 Paris - 21 AO
Nadal’s showing here is pretty good, too.
The ladies
My main priority here was to put Medvedev’s streak in perspective, but since I’ve got the code handy, let’s aim it at the WTA dataset, too.
The record–again since 1985–belongs to Martina Navratilova, who won 22 straight against top-ten opposition in ’85 and ’86. Navratilova put together another 20 or so after the first streak was broken, Serena Williams and Steffi Graf both ran off streaks around 19, and Justine Henin once won 17 in a row. I’m emphasizing the uncertainty here–and opting not to print a full list–because it will take a bit more legwork to establish exact numbers. Many of these streaks begin or end during the round-robin stage of the year-end finals, and my database doesn’t specify the sequence of those matches.
We can still get a general idea, though. Graf has five separate streaks of 10 or more top-ten wins, and Williams has four. Navratilova has three, though she almost definitely had more in late 1970s and early 1980s, a period for which I lack official ranking data.
The current level of parity on the women’s tour has kept the number of streaks down. No one has gotten to double digits since Serena’s last streak ended at the 2014 tour finals. If you’re looking to Naomi Osaka to change that, you’ll be waiting a long time, as she hasn’t played a top-ten opponent since Brisbane at the start of last year, when she lost the final to Karolina Pliskova. She isn’t quite in Medvedev territory yet–her current streak stands at zero.