We are going to July.
This is the main press room at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, at Wimbledon, and Novak Djokovic (35) tells us:
This is all very strange, I know. But I'm not going to go out of my way to get to the Masters Cup. It does not take away the dream.
And now you have to explain.
In January, Novak Djokovic (35) was expelled from the Australian Open for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It was the first episode of a strange course.
In March he injured his abs, conditioning his first weeks of spring.
In July, he did not score points at Wimbledon either: the ATP circuit had punished the tournament for vetoing the presence of Russian tennis players. Wimbledon was not going to distribute points. Despite winning his 21st Grand Slam, Djokovic did not advance in the ranking. He would follow seventh.
His presence at the US Open was also up in the air, already in September: the man continued to refuse to be vaccinated and the magnificent American tournament was studying the possibility of leaving him out, as the Australians had done in January.
He was not in New York then, more points that escaped him.
And so, anticipating all that, at Wimbledon in July, he said:
-I don't know if I will enter the next Masters Cup. But I'm not going to go around playing all kinds of tournaments to score points.
(...)
What happens is that then it began to fly.
He won in Tel Aviv and Astana and was a finalist in the Masters 1,000 in Paris. With all these successes in his bag, he loaded himself with points and guaranteed a place in the Masters Cup that opened its way to Turin this Sunday.
There we have him once again, among the eight rackets of the year. Posing for the crowd. Djokovic was never bad at the closing tournament of the course. In fact, he has won it five times. However, it's been a while since his last triumph: it's time to go back to 2018.
And from that 2018 to the present, things have changed.
Federer is not. Stubborn Nadal. Medvedev or Tsitsipás follow, but new blood arrives, people like Ruud and Auger-Aliassime (waiting for the injured Alcaraz, the cyclone Rune and the consolidation of Sinner).
So Djokovic, as soon as he grabbed a microphone, has said in Turin these days:
I don't feel as young as the others. It's been a while since my first participation, but I think I'm in good shape and I feel motivated and eager to face this challenge.
So he never went out of his way to get to this Masters Cup.
But since we are, it is.
