Unplayed Australian Open is a Milestone for Novak Djokovic


After all the dubious decisions and the bruises in his image, another Djokovic tailspin was out of the question, but as a reflection of his perseverance and talent, he roared in 2021 with one of his best seasons: he won his first three Grand Slam tournaments. and the first men’s Grand Slam in singles in 52 years to win in a single game before losing to Daniil Medvedev in the US Open final.

This show of endurance in 2021 should give pause to anyone who can expect to curl up on the floor of Djokovic’s Monte Carlo apartment and roll like a ball after the Australian incident.

We’re talking about a player who, despite growing up in Belgrade during the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, became a champion at a time when the NATO bombing forced him to interrupt his tennis training sessions. She left home at age 12 for a tennis academy in Germany as her parents and family borrowed and improvised to fund her education in the hopes that the sport would be her and their way to better days. Djokovic told me that his father, Srdjan, once gathered the family and smashed 10 Deutsche Marks on the kitchen table and that’s all the money was left.

“More than ever before, we need to stay connected and get through this together and find the way,” Djokovic said in that interview. Said. “This was a very powerful and very influential moment in my growth, in my life, in all of our lives.”

What is an expulsion compared to all this?

The answer seems obvious, but body blows can add up. Djokovic is used to being a stranger, hearing the roars of support from Federer and other opponents and still winning. He went so far as to imagine the crowd chanting his name instead, but it has never been such a global goal.

While he insists he doesn’t want to be an anti-vaccine champion, it means that his iconoclastic stance in Australia – one of the top 100 unvaccinated male players – will be indelibly associated with the issue.

Energy is one of Djokovic’s hallmarks. Spend one-on-one time with him and his vitality and restless curiosity come to light, but in recent years he’s put a lot of effort into causes beyond winning tennis matches: taking on the status quo on the men’s tour and creating a new group, change and greater decision-making power for players at all levels of the standings. – so far unsuccessfully – to encourage. He helped start a new tournament in Belgrade, did charity work in Serbia and the Balkan region, and collaborated on a behind-the-scenes documentary expected to be released in 2022.



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