Rybakina calls 2028 Olympic tennis schedule 'crazy' as Wimbledon-to-LA gap shrinks to three days
Elena Rybakina has called the 2028 Olympic tennis schedule "crazy" after LA28 confirmed the tournament will run from 19 to 28 July 2028 — just three days after the Wimbledon men's final on 16 July.
The 2022 Wimbledon champion wants the sport's governing bodies to rethink the calendar. "I hope something will change to make it more convenient for everybody," Rybakina said, according to The Guardian. The turnaround is stark when measured against recent history: at the Paris 2024 Olympics, players had 13 days between the end of Wimbledon and the start of the tennis event. In Los Angeles, they will have three.
Daniil Medvedev was not even aware of the gap until asked. The former US Open champion believes there should be at least six or seven days between the two events, and called for changes to the timetable. For players who go deep at both Wimbledon and the Olympics — playing up to seven matches at each — the compression leaves almost no room for rest, travel, or the transition from grass courts to the hard courts that Olympic tennis in Los Angeles will use.
Grass and hard courts are different surfaces with different footholds, different bounces, and different demands on the body. A player who reaches the Wimbledon final on Sunday 16 July and then competes in LA from Tuesday 19 July would need to fly across nine time zones and switch surfaces inside 72 hours. The opening day of the Olympic tennis event already includes mixed doubles first-round matches, scheduled from 11:00 to 16:30 Pacific time, according to the LA28 hospitality site.
The wider Games begin with the Opening Ceremony on 14 July 2028, according to LA28, and run through 30 July. Tennis is among the first sports in action, starting five days after the ceremony and ending on the final day of the Games.
For tennis, the squeeze is unusually tight. The sport's calendar is already one of the most congested in world sport — an 11-month season that runs from January's Australian Open through to November's ATP and WTA Finals, with players rarely getting more than a few weeks off across the year. Wedging an Olympic event — which, unlike a regular tour event, requires players to represent their countries and often compete in both singles and doubles — into a three-day window after a Grand Slam is a logistical puzzle that Rybakina and Medvedev clearly feel has not been thought through.
Whether the schedule changes before 2028 is up to the International Tennis Federation, the ATP, the WTA, and the LA28 organising committee. None has yet publicly responded to the players' concerns. With two years still to go, there is time for a rethink — but for now, the calendar says three days.
