In September he was called to add bigger than anyone and sit at the table with Laver and Budge. His track in Melbourne is more that of a convict than that of a nine-time champion.
Just over five months ago Novak Djokovic he had earned the right to dream of the best possible professional future. While Rafael Nadal He was on crutches at a clinic in Barcelona, after treating the foot injury that has kept him off the slopes since last August, and Roger Federer had already announced a new and forced truce of several months due to his serious knee problems, the Serbian had before him the possibility of becoming the most successful player in history, in addition to sitting at the same table Rod Laver Y Donald Budge, the only two tennis players to have won all four Grand Slam titles in the same season. Djokovic had left behind his stumble in the Olympic Games and was going to play the final of the US Open, an open door to win his twenty-first major and mark distances with Federer and Nadal.
The images that the almost recently released 2022 brings are those of a convict who has exposed a good part of his sports and personal credit in a reckless as well as irrational stake. Djokovic lost with hardly any reply against Daniil Medvedev in the final of the US Open, but then celebrated the compassionate and caring treatment of the New York public. Jealous of the glamor that Nadal and Federer exude once he started to stand up to them, Nole found in popular support a sentimental alibi to get out of perhaps the biggest disappointment of his career.
Things have changed in a short time. Since January 4, at 11:55 in the morning, he wrote a Twitter message announcing that he was traveling to Melbourne to play the tournament after receiving a medical exemption, text illustrated with his smiling image resting on the racket bag, until the 16th, when the Federal Court of Australia took up his case after he Alex Hawke If his visa was revoked for the second time, having verified the succession of irregularities committed to enter the country, Djokovic has ceased to be observed as the best tennis player on the planet to earn the rejection of 83% of the citizens of Australia and remain as a symbol of the wild hordes that deny scientific evidence and endanger public health. In Melbourne he won, in 2008, at the age of 20, the first of his 20 majors, and it was there, with eight more titles, where he exhibited the best foundations to join a fight to which he had not been called in principle. No one knows how what happened in Australia can mark the rest of his career, but it is clear that his claim to be recognized and appreciated by the people as are his two greatest competitors for eternal glory has precisely and definitively crashed in the city that he lives in. witnessed his true takeoff into the elite. Whatever happens, whoever hangs his racket perched on the most desired and unattainable place, any evocation of Nole will bring back this terrible episode never lived in the history of tennis.
discredited
With his stubborn reluctance to get vaccinated in the face of humanity’s worst pandemic in more than a century and his ruses to try to circumvent the rules, Djokovic has lost his footing on all fronts. He is no longer the best placed to add more greats than anyone else and, furthermore, far from that longed-for reconciliation with the fans of this sport, it is very likely that his figure will be received with rejection in most scenarios. It remains to be seen to what extent this unfortunate extra-sports show can affect the relationship with the brands that sponsor it.
Until now, the controversy surrounding Djokovic could be viewed with some indulgence. The tennis player disqualified at the 2020 United States Open for inadvertently hitting a judge after an untimely reaction in his round of 16 match against Pablo Carreo, the player who had a bad reputation for stopping, not always with credible arguments, some important games when the score did not favor him, the grumpy, defiant and angry man who lost his hand with his rackets in adverse situations, the young man who, victim of that perennial obsession with seducing the audience, parodied the image of his companions with imitations at the foot of the track, he was far from crossing the borders that this time he has knocked down. The errors originally committed by the Australian Open, which took on powers that did not correspond to it when contemplating a medical exemption that would exempt tennis players who could benefit from it from vaccination, the lack of coordination between the Federal Government and that of the state of Victoria, as well as the questionable treatment that was dispensed to him before the first favorable judicial resolution, in little mitigate the disapproval that deserves the arrogant, irresponsible and almost criminal behavior of an athlete who, if it is not possible to ask for exemplary, yes, at least , respect for the rules that concern everyone.
In the prolonged sequence of events since he was detained at the border on the 6th, there was no lack of the excited reaction of his family. His parents, Srdjan Y Diana, and his brother Djordje, called two press conferences, in the first of which an ultranationalist and messianic discourse prevailed, with which they tried to encourage the diplomatic conflict with Australia, with the endorsement of the country’s president, Aleksandar Vucic. Days later, the Serbian prime minister, Ana Brnabic, was much more restrained when he learned that Djokovic had skipped quarantine after testing positive for Covid, and accused him of a “serious violation” of the country’s laws. Within her vehement proclamations, her mother described the first judicial resolution as the most important triumph of her career. Nole. He did not contemplate that shortly afterwards the cruelest of his defeats could come.
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