Daniil Medvedev and
Iga Swiatek did an Instagram Live together for the company that makes both of their racquets and during that Swiatek compared the Russian's playing style with a pretzel.
Iga Swiatek and Daniil Medvedev both use Technifibre racquets and to promote the product they took part in a joint Instagram live where they discussed many different things. Obviously, as tennis players, they talked tennis as well and during the Live, Swiatek compared Medvedev's playing style to a pretzel.
During the live Swiatek jokingly said:
"Actually we're going to work on you not playing like a pretzel. Sorry Daniil, but I was
watching your games, wait, maybe in English it's not a pretzel? "It's
just bread, that, it's like. I don't want you to feel bad about
it, but I mean, you make these weird poses, hitting backhands. It's
great, I love watching that."
Medvedev has a very distinctive style of tennis that is admittedly not the most aesthetically pleasing type of tennis but the Russian proved it to be very effective. It's so effective that he recently won his maiden Grand Slam trophy in New York at the US Open. On Swiatek's comments he said:
"No one has ever called me a pretzel before. Okay, it's gonna be one of my many nicknames that I have."
The Russian then explained the reason behind his distinct playing style:
"I mean, since I was young, I was really uncoordinated. So that's how I was playing, you know? Everybody was hitting strong at me, and I was doing lobs. I mean, I have nothing much to it. So I was not doing amazing technically, but I always wanted to win. So I tried to find shots that would annoy my opponent because they were better than me."