Novak Djokovic will take a first step into uncharted territory when he opens his Olympic campaign against Bolivia’s Hugo Dellien on the Ariake Coliseum court in Tokyo. From grand slams to Master series events, Djokovic has won almost every major competition that tennis has to offer at least twice. The one notable exception is the Olympic men’s singles, an event in which his best result to date came in 2008, when he won a bronze medal in Beijing. Djokovic will be 37 by the time the Paris Olympics heave into view in 2024, an age at which even he may no longer be the automatic favourite for every competition he enters. Tokyo offers an opportunity that may not come again.
The stakes are exponentially magnified by Djokovic’s triumphant march through the first three majors of the year. Should he win the Olympics and then claim a fourth US Open title, Djokovic would become only the second player in history to complete a golden grand slam, a clean sweep of all four majors plus Olympic gold. The first, Steffi Graf, accomplished the feat in 1988, when the dominance of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert was at an end and Monica Seles had yet to emerge as the next serial slam winner. With Roger Federer and Andy Murray struggling to recapture their best form following surgery, and Rafael Nadal nursing the mental scars inflicted by his defeat to Djokovic in Paris, the Serb – high on confidence and in the form of his life – finds himself at a similarly opportune juncture. It is the rarest of opportunities, a perfect convergence of form and fortune, and Djokovic could not be better placed to capitalise.
Yet tennis is not a game of foregone conclusions. Serena Williams discovered as much in 2015, when she faltered in the US Open semi-finals against Roberta Vinci, just three sets short of becoming the first woman since Graf to complete the grand slam. Like Djokovic, Williams had an aura of invincibility; come hell or high water, she always found a way to win. She arrived in New York ready to take on the world, confident that she had the experience required to deal with any challenge that came her way.
“I always feel there’s another record, then there’s always another person to catch up with or to pass,” said Williams, prefiguring what has since become a recurring refrain in Djokovic press conferences. “Wimbledon gave me unbelievable practice for this. At Wimbledon I was going for the second Serena slam. That is rare. So that really gave me the best practice and preparation in terms of going for the grand slam.”
Djokovic has likewise talked of drawing on experience to deal with the pressure of competing for a place in history. “It’s really a learning process, a learning curve, and the more you practice that, and the more you experience that on the court, particularly on the biggest courts in our sport, the more comfortable you become and the more familiar you are with yourself,” he said after winning Wimbledon to draw level with Federer and Nadal on 20 majors.
With 30 grand slam finals behind him, Djokovic is a past master at handling the big occasion. Yet the path to greatness has been an arduous one. By the time Djokovic won his second major, at the Australian Open in 2011, Federer had already accumulated 16 slams and Nadal nine. Djokovic spent the next decade trying to catch up. So when the chance to equal his two great rivals finally arrived, he was understandably nervous. To win Wimbledon is one thing; to win Wimbledon and equal the record of the two greatest players ever to lift a racket, quite another. Not even the experience of six previous finals at the All England Club could adequately prepare Djokovic for the seventh. Not with Federer and Nadal finally in his sights; not with history at stake.
“I did feel before the semis and finals [of Wimbledon] slightly different emotion, in terms of expectations and the tension build-up, than I have maybe in the past, because of history on the line,” said Djokovic. “I’m aware of it, even though I was trying not to think about it too much, and just trying to approach this match as any other match, but sometimes things are so big off the court that it’s hard to avoid them in a way. But you learn how to deal with them, you learn how to accept the circumstances that you’re going through, and try to transform that into the fuel that you need on the court.”
Williams will recognise these sentiments only too well. The American has been trying since 2018 to equal Margaret Court’s all-time record of 24 majors. In that time, she has come out on the wrong side of four grand slam finals. Would Williams have fared better without history on the line? It does not seem unlikely. The prospect of sporting immortality exerts a crushing weight. The pressure nearly did for Graf in 1988. “I especially remember the extreme fatigue I experienced in New York,” the German recalled. “I felt an expectation around me that was not mine, that became oppressive and kept me from focusing on my tournament. It was terrible.”
Such are the challenges that lie ahead for Djokovic. From this point on, he will be a marked man in the locker room, his scalp a chance to go down in history as the man who stopped one of the greatest players of all time from completing the golden slam. Media scrutiny and public expectation will intensify with each passing victory. At the Olympics, the difficulty of the task will be compounded by the three-set format, which means Djokovic will not have the luxury of coming from behind as he did against Lorenzo Musetti (who he could face in the third round) and Stefanos Tsitsipas at the French Open. Neither is he overjoyed about the absence of fans and the coronavirus restrictions in place in Japan.
There are few players better equipped to negotiate such obstacles than Djokovic. The man from Belgrade is as hard as nails, a “mentality monster”, to borrow the epithet Jürgen Klopp applied to his all-conquering Liverpool team. His success in overcoming the anxiety he felt before facing Matteo Berrettini on Centre Court is merely the most recent addition to a growing body of evidence that suggests Djokovic is equal to any challenge tennis can throw at him. If a player can beat Nadal at the French Open, what can’t he do?
Nonetheless, winning the Olympics, let alone the US Open, is unlikely to be a formality. Djokovic says he has learned from the experience of the Rio Games in 2016, when he left the court in tears after suffering a first-round defeat to Juan Martín Del Potro. “I built such a huge pressure and expectation of myself, it was just unbearable, it was too much, and at the time I just wasn’t aware how to handle it in a proper way,” Djokovic told the American journalist Graham Bensinger last year, emphasising the “huge honour and privilege” he felt in representing Serbia. “Four years later, I have more experience mentally [and] emotionally, so I will make certain changes … I need to treat it as any other big tournament that I play individually.”
That may be easier said than done. Having previously admitted that he felt conflicted about travelling to Tokyo, Djokovic declared this week: “It came down to patriotism and my feelings for Serbia.” Yet perhaps the sense that he is playing for something bigger than himself is exactly what Djokovic needs at this point. National pride, so central to his undoing in Rio, may yet prove the making of him in Tokyo.