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Most fans know about the tennis Grand Slam: winning the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open in the same calendar year.
But for something so well known, it’s an extremely rare achievement.
On the men’s side, only Don Budge in 1938 and Rod Laver in 1962 and 1969 they succeeded. Since then, few have come particularly close to pairing them. But this year Novak Djokovic Win the weekend at Wimbledon, three-quarters of the way there.
Apart from Budge, Laver and Djokovic, only two men, Jack Crawford in 1933 and Lew Hoad in 1956, even won the first three Slam events. (Both nearly got their Slams at the US Open, losing Crawford to Fred Perry and Hoad to Ken Rosewall in the final.)
Since Laver’s last Slam, only three have won even the first two events before Djokovic this year, Mats Wilander in 1988, Jim Courier in 1992 and Djokovic himself in 2016.
On the women’s side, the Grand Slam is also rare, with Maureen Connolly in 1953, Margaret Court in 1970 and Steffi Graf in 1988 sweeps four events.
Perhaps due to the difficulty of winning the Grand Slam, a less formal “Serena Slam” was invented after Serena Williams. Won four consecutive events from 2002-3, but not in the same calendar year. Williams did this again in 2014-15. He was actually beaten to success by Martina Navratilova, who did it in 1984-85.
Djokovic has the only Serena Slam for men in the 2015-16 season. Had he not taken first place in the fourth round from the US Open last fall, he could have completed another one on Sunday. accidentally hitting a line woman with a ball hit in anger.
There’s also the easier-to-reach career Grand Slam, where a player has won every Slam event at some point in their career. On the men’s side, this adds to the notebook the modern trio of Perry, Roy Emerson, Andre Agassi and Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic.
It is the different surfaces on which the tournaments are played that increase the difficulty of completing a Slam of any type. Great players like Pete Sampras and John McEnroe, for example, have never won the French Open on the ground.
In addition to the US Open, where Djokovic will participate in the Slam that will start on August 30, the men’s singles competition continues at the Tokyo Olympics, which will start on July 24. Djokovic said he is undecided about whether to play in the Serbian Olympics. . If he won the gold medal and the US Open, success would be called the Golden Slam. Just Graf in 1988 He succeeded, but tennis Budge, Laver, Connolly, and Court were not part of the Grand Slams Games.
Djokovic has a dominant position in the men’s game at 34, as Nadal and Federer have been slow to fade and young stars to emerge.
Djokovic has lost five sets in seven of his seven matches at the Australian Open and six sets in France. But he lost just two points at Wimbledon and never had a serious challenge, despite losing the first set of the final to Matteo Berrettini in the tie-break. 34-3 years old per year.
Djokovic is listed as the equal money favorite of the US Open, meaning bookies and odds give him a 50 percent chance of winning. (It’s money, even for the Olympics.)
Nadal, Dominic Thiem, Daniil Medvedev and many more will stand before us. But the chance to see something this year that no man since 1969 and no woman since 1988 has done is very real.
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