When Novak Djokovic grimly shook his head before halting the proceedings of his Wimbledon quarter-final match against Tomas Berdych on Wednesday, his decision came as a complete shock.
However, looking back at that frenetic 63-minute encounter – which included a medical time-out for the Serbian – it doesn’t seem surprising that Djokovic’s exit from the tournament came to be as it did. But, is rather apropos of the way his physical fitness – the X-factor upon which his revitalised game had been built upon – has had started to crumble, in this last one year.
The timeline of transformation
Back in 2011, when Djokovic won the third of his eventual 12-Slam haul, his subscribing to the gluten-free diet was a theory assumed by many as a fad. However, in the next five years as he continued to hit peak-after-peak, it didn’t take long for these scepticisms to change, as his altered dietary plan gained the status of a fable.
In the wake of the deluge of upsets ever since he lost at Wimbledon in 2016, lapses in focus have been commonplace. However, it has now become evident that despite the fail-safes employed by Djokovic to guard his body, his physique has started to retaliate against the rigorousness that he put it through in his machine-like consistency, tournament-after-tournament. And, where his altered dietary chart may have helped him achieve fitness, even they have proved insufficient to get him past the injuries that have come to ail him.
The battering of the physique
Djokovic’s predicament with injuries began with an injury to his left wrist which hampered him for most parts of the latter-half of the 2016 season, including at the Rio Games and the US Open.
Djokovic’s run to the US Open began on an unsteady note after he was forced to pull out of the Cincinnati Masters, which left him with an incomplete Masters 1000 trophy in his otherwise full title collection.
At Flushing Meadows, his decision to miss the Cincinnati Masters looked to have worked out in his favour as he did reach the final. But, countering this aspect was also fact that only three of his six matches in the earlier rounds were completed in entirety. Likewise, while his final against Stan Wawrinka lasted awhile, in terms of its momentum, it was the Swiss who held control before eventually getting the better of Djokovic.
Cut to 2017, right before the start of the season’s second Masters’ tournament, there was Djokovic’s elbow acting up again. As brief as his hiatus was, his comeback to the tour at the Monte Carlo Masters – after a pretty speedy recovery – looks to have impacted him far more adversely now. And not for the first time this year, he spoke about considering a lengthy absence to recuperate, even to the extent of possibly missing the US Open this year.
“I haven’t felt this much pain ever since I’ve had this injury, so it’s not a good sign. Obviously, [the] schedule will be readjusted. We’ll see,” remarked the 30-year-old in his post-match press conference on Wednesday. “The more I play, the worse it gets. I guess the break is something that I will have to consider right now. Now, I am paying interest for all these years as a professional, my body is giving me signals.”
The latter assessment is something that Brad Gilbert, former world No 4 and Djokovic’s current coach Andre Agassi’s former mentor agrees with. The fact that Djokovic’s elbow injury has become recurring in these past 13 months is something the American feels Djokovic needs to take a look at right away by delving into the source of the problem.
“This is concerning for Novak because he has had it before,” said Gilbert on ESPN. Correlating back to the similar developments in 2016, Gilbert also noted, “Last summer he really struggled with the elbow. He wasn’t able to practice the same way. This is a continuing injury from that.”
“So, it is something that has to be addressed and figured out [as to] what’s causing the problem. It looked to me besides the serve, it also affects him on the backhand where he really can’t unload [his shots]. To me, it’s obviously a concern.”
Djokovic himself had a more matter-of-fact view to all this. “At the end of the day, we’re all humans. We’ve got to go through these stages,” he said. But the reality is, he has quite an arduous journey of rebuilding ahead of him.
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