Djokovic Looked Old at the Australian Open

Photo: Andy Cheung/Getty Images

Novak Djokovic will turn 37 years old in May, but beyond the odd fleck of gray in his hair, you wouldn’t usually know it by watching him. Djokovic, the World No. 1 with 24 majors to his name, is the fourth-oldest man in the top 100 and the only 30-something player in the top ten. But because he routinely manhandles opponents 15 years his junior, one can temporarily discount the remarkableness of his longevity. A brief reminder: The oldest man ever to win a major was the formidable Ken Rosewall, at 37, back in 1972. Roger Federer managed one at 36, and Djokovic himself two, when he won the U.S. Open in September and the French Open in June.

This is a different era, athletes are thriving into their late 30s with some regularity, and Djokovic treats his body like a temple through which no un-vetted calorie (or lives-saving vaccine) will pass. But eventually, at least you’d think, something’s gotta give. And in a resounding semifinal loss to the Italian powerhouse Jannik Sinner at the Australian Open on Friday morning, Djokovic looked — well, if not exactly elderly, then at least old-adjacent.

There’s a difference between coming out flat and the display Djokovic put on during the first two sets, which, for American TV viewers, was punctuated by ESPN’s commentators continuously remarking that they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The greatest player ever to pick up a racket looked like he was attempting to relearn the sport after a traumatic injury. Among the tools that all but went missing from his usually deadly arsenal: his usually commanding backhand, his forehand, his drop shot. Mostly, his timing. Djokovic sprayed unforced errors all over the court for over an hour. He righted the ship somewhat in the third set, thanks in large part to some precision serving and his killer instinct in tiebreaks, but never quite looked himself. He ended up with 54 unforced errors. The world’s best-ever returner of serve never even glimpsed a break point (Sinner, it should be noted at least once, served and played fantastically well throughout) and won only 34 percent of games overall, the least in a match for him since 2007. In the fourth set, down 1-2, Djokovic was broken by Sinner after blowing a 40-0 advantage — another parallel-universe moment — and that was pretty much the end. The whole time, Djokovic seemed both helpless and weary. Was it just an off day or something more?

The performance didn’t come completely out of nowhere. Djokovic is the undisputed king of the Australian Open — he has won the tournament a record ten times, including four of the past five, and hadn’t lost a match there since 2018 — but in his post-match interview, after remarking that “I guess this is one of the worst Grand Slam matches I’ve ever played,” he acknowledged that he had rarely found his rhythm in Melbourne during the entire fortnight.

“To be honest, you know, the whole tournament I haven’t really played close to my best,” he said, before issuing a caveat that this “doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s [the] beginning of the end, you know, as some people like to call it.”

Such is Djokovic’s standing in big matches — he was an astounding 20–0 in Aussie Open semifinals and finals before Friday — that prognosticators largely dismissed the rust he displayed in the early rounds as noise. (To be fair, that’s been a fairly common pattern for him in past majors.) And maybe it was. After all, 20-year-old Carlos Alcaraz looked even more out of sorts earlier this week in a quarterfinal against Alexander Zverev than Djokovic did on Friday. And just four months ago, Djokovic pushed 27-year-old Daniil Medvedev around Arthur Ashe Stadium en route to his fourth U.S. Open title, looking for all the world like he was the younger player of the two. Surely things couldn’t deteriorate that fast? But the thing about getting older is that sometimes they do. There won’t be any mystery on this question; the coming months will deliver a quick verdict as to whether Djokovic is finally ceding serious ground to a generation that may not be old enough to remember the last time he played this badly, and whether Sinner’s win is epochal or more incremental.

“Father time is undefeated,” John McEnroe intoned at one point on Friday, as a stunned-looking Djokovic tried to find his game in front of a stunned-looked crowd. It’s a cliché, but one that remains very true.