Analysis: Djokovic’s frustration in Australia could be career turning point

Even after being expelled from Australia, Novak Djokovic will continue to be the first place in the men’s tennis ranking, at the end of the Australian Open, which started this Monday (17) without his participation.

He still holds the Roland Garros and Wimbledon titles. He continues to have nimble limbs, formidable tennis technique and a long history of durability in the face of hostile crowds and remote chances of success.

But in a sport that seems to place more importance on recently won titles than the past, and is often categorized by eras and the champions that define them, it wouldn’t be surprising if Sunday’s events turned out to be a turning point. , symbolized by Djokovic’s long, grim walk to the Melbourne airport departure gate, escorted by immigration officials.

Djokovic is 34 years old, and as he left Australia unwillingly after his visa was cancelled, a new generation of men’s tennis stars, talented and taller than he, was preparing to fight for the Grand Tournament title. Slam that Djokovic dominated like no one else. A tournament he may never play again if the decision banning him from entering the country for three years is not rescinded.

“That would certainly be a heavy blow for him,” said John Isner, a friend of Djokovic’s and one of the highest ranked American tennis players. “Honestly, I don’t know which direction things should go. It could be that it takes him a long time to recover from what happened, or maybe it inspires him to come back even stronger.”

Djokovic has already recovered from demoralizing periods in the past and is back to winning ways. In 2017, after perhaps the most dominant phase of his career, he struggled with motivation and lost the will to compete for more than a year, amid personal problems and a persistent injury to his right elbow.

He showed, in that period, a dedication to natural methods of healing that foreshadowed his decision not to vaccinate himself against the coronavirus. But after playing the 2018 Australian Open with his elbow supported by a compression sleeve, he decided, with tears in his eyes, that he would have surgery.

Five months later, he was again champion of a Grand Slam tournament, winning the Wimbledon title in 2018. And soon he re-established himself in the first position of the ranking, leaving behind the biggest rivals of his career, Roger Federer and Rafael. Nadal.

At the start of 2020, Djokovic continued to be in excellent form, starting the year with 18 straight wins before the pandemic brought tennis to a halt for five months.

He organized a reckless friendly event in Serbia and Croatia in June of that year, during the forced shutdown. The tournament became a source of mass contagion and a public relations crisis when footage emerged showing the tennis player and other players and members of his support staff, including Djokovic’s coach Goran Ivanisevic, dancing without masks on a party in a nightclub in the Balkans, completely contrary to the atmosphere of caution that dominated the planet.

The tour by ATP, the men’s professional tennis association, has been cancelled. Djokovic and his wife, Jelena, Ivanisevic and others were caught in coronavirus tests. When the tennis player returned to the Grand Slam tournaments, at the US Open, he caused his own elimination in the round of 16, when he shot a ball with his racket in a moment of frustration and inadvertently hurt a lineman, hit by the ball in the throat.

He was kicked out of the tournament by the head referee and returned to Europe to regain control. Young Austrian Dominic Thiem took the title.

After all his dubious decisions and the shake-ups suffered by his image, another Djokovic freefall couldn’t be ruled out, but in a reflection of his tenacity and talent, he bounced back spectacularly in 2021 with one of the best seasons of his career. career: Won the first three Grand Slam tournaments of the year and was one victory away from winning the first men’s singles Grand Slam in 52 years, before being defeated by Daniil Medvedev in the US Open final.

The display of resilience he put on in 2021 should be enough to cast doubt on those who believe Djokovic will retreat to his Monte Carlo apartment and isolate himself from the world after what happened in Australia.

We’re talking about a player who became champion despite growing up in Belgrade during the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, when NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) bombings occasionally forced him to stop tennis practice.

He left home at age 12 for a tennis academy in Germany while his parents and relatives borrowed money and improvised to fund his training. There was hope that sport would be the way for the son, and the whole family, to find better days. Djokovic said that one day his father, Srdjan, gathered the family together and placed a 10 Deutschmark note on the table, explaining that that was all the money they had left.

“And he said that more than ever we had to stick together, get through it together and figure out how to get out of that situation,” Djokovic said. “It was a very powerful moment and a very big impact on my growth and on my life, on all of our lives.”

Compared to that, a deportation doesn’t weigh so much.

This is a statement that may seem self-evident, but the accumulated setbacks weigh heavily. Djokovic is used to being the outcast, to hearing the cheers of the crowd in support of Federer and other opponents, and to winning anyway. In the past, he even imagined that the crowd was actually screaming his name; but it had never been the target of such worldwide hostility as it is now.

While he insists that he does not want to be a champion of the opposition to vaccines, the consequences of the iconoclastic stance he has adopted in Australia – Djokovic is one of only three players who have not been vaccinated, among the top 100 in the men’s world rankings – will indelibly link him to the question. And, as long as he insists on not getting vaccinated, he will face difficulties in entering certain countries and tournaments.

Energy is one of Djokovic’s hallmarks. It only takes a few minutes in his company to realize his life force and tireless curiosity. In recent years, he has devoted a lot of energy to causes other than winning tennis tournaments: he decided to change the status quo on the men’s tour and create a new player organization in order to promote – so far unsuccessfully – changes to the system and to check out more. decision-making power to players at all ranking levels.

He helped start a new tournament in Belgrade, did relief work in Serbia and the Balkan region, and cooperated on a behind-the-scenes documentary about his life due out in 2022.

Content will not be lacking: both remarkable triumphs and brutal setbacks. When will this start to affect your hunger to win? Maybe the time has come.

Even in his remarkable 2021 season there were hints of a new vulnerability on the court. Djokovic reduced his number of matches, recognizing that time passes for everyone and that it is better to focus energy on the biggest tournaments. But he stumbled a few times and missed his goal at the Tokyo Olympics, leaving the Games without a medal, defeated by Alexander Zverev in the singles semifinals.

The Australian Open will go ahead without Djokovic for the first time since 2004 and, with Federer also out through injury, it will be the first time in Nadal’s long career that he has played a Grand Slam tournament as the sole representative of the Big Three.

Their era was one of the most captivating and enduring in the sport, and the three share the record for Grand Slam achievements, each with 20 titles. That they end their careers still tied is not out of the question. Their era is coming to an end, given their age and the rise of new talent. Everything that happened in Melbourne in the last 11 days could accelerate this transition.