Thijs Boogaard Wins First ATP Match at Libema Open to Face Medvedev in Round of 16

The organizers of the 2026 ATP Libema Open gave a wildcard entry to 17-year-old Dutch player Thijs Boogaard. Most people expected this to be nothing more than a nice opportunity for a local teenager to experience his first ATP main-draw match. They assumed he would likely lose to a more experienced player in the first round and that his tournament would end quickly.

Boogaard had other ideas entirely, and by the time he walked off the grass in Rosmalen on Wednesday afternoon he had beaten Wu Yibing 6-3, 2-6, 6-4 in an hour and 55 minutes to claim the first ATPTour main draw victory of his career, becoming the second-youngest match winner in the tournament's entire history and setting up a second round meeting against former world number one Daniil Medvedev that the whole of Dutch tennis is now talking about.

The match was not straightforward. Wu took the second set comfortably and had Boogaard under real pressure at various points but the teenager kept finding his way back into the contest and closed it out in the third to send the home crowd inside the venue into the kind of noise that only a local player winning can produce.

Boogaard and Medvedev know each other from the practice court, which means the Russian arrives in the second round facing someone who is not completely unfamiliar with how he moves and hits, but knowing how a former world number one plays in practice and actually playing against him on Centre Court in front of a packed Dutch crowd are two completely different experiences, and Boogaard will need everything he showed against Wu and considerably more to pull off what would be one of the bigger upsets of the grass court season so far.

Medvedev arrives at this match having already won two titles in 2026, in Brisbane and Dubai, and carries a 24-9 record on the season into Thursday's contest as the clear favourite to advance.

"It feels incredible to win my first match on the ATP Tour," Boogaard said. "I’m very happy with my performance. I’m very happy with the win of course and the memory that will stick with me will be the moment that I won the last point, just the sigh of relief and the feeling that I got."

Sportscape feels that a 17-year-old wildcard winning his first ATP match on home soil and then drawing a former world number one in the next round is the kind of story that the grass court season needed at the start of a week that had been largely dominated by bigger names and predictable results, and whatever happens when Boogaard and Medvedev share a court on Thursday, the young Dutchman has already given Dutch tennis something worth remembering from this week in Rosmalen.