The blessing and curse of being Novak Djokovic at 39

Time will not be announced. It waits. And one Friday evening in July there was a choice.

In Melbourne in January, Novak Djokovic made that debt look avoidable. Four hours and nine minutes, 3-6, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, and Jannik Sinner, the man tennis now calls a robotic version of the world-class Djokovic, a serve with jab, a return as good as the sport has ever produced, no discernible weakness, simply survived. Something in Djokovic that afternoon refused to be 38. A five-set semifinal, the record books rewritten.

Cut to Central Court, six months. Djokovic was now 39 and into the semi-finals, again against Sinner, from the back of the stopwatch: five hours and fifteen minutes to rescue Felix Auger-Aliassime the previous Tuesday, the longest quarter-final in Wimbledon history. Two full days and an extra afternoon for recovery. It would be enough against most men.

Sinner gave him nothing. It wasn’t so much a settling of scores, a serve that arrived as if it had been fired rather than struck, sometimes clutching Djokovic’s body, sometimes disappearing wide, always followed by a sprint to the net to end the point before it had a chance to become one. Djokovic matched him for a while and equalized at 4:4 in the first set. Then came the turning point and Sinner never looked back. Two hours and twenty minutes and it was done: 6-4, 6-4, 6-4. A knockout dressed politely as a tennis match.

If Tuesday said Djokovic was still ahead of his time, Friday was the correction. He gave it all he had and it wasn’t enough against a no-fake serve and no-zero baseline game. There was something almost cruelly poetic about it: The Sinner did to Djokovic point for point exactly what Djokovic had done to everyone else for two decades.

The difference was in the smallest margins. Sinner gave him exactly one break point in the entire match, in the third set, in almost two hours, and answered it with one of sixteen unreachable aces. Djokovic didn’t break Sinner’s serve once all afternoon. He saved ten out of thirteen break points against him. He saved sixteen of eighteen in Melbourne. The difference between the two numbers was more or less the entire game.

“It was a good old shot. There wasn’t much I could do,” Djokovic said afterwards, the most effective autopsy of a demolition ever by a man who just survived it.

PUZZLE

Djokovic said he will try to return to Wimbledon in 2027 (Photo Reuters)

Here’s the number underneath it all: almost three years since his last Grand Slam. A 25th major that would have left him alone at the top of the only list he’s ever cared about keeps falling away one tournament at a time. By every visible measure, the clock wins. And yet Djokovic has already promised one more dance at SW19 next year, as if daring him to try to stop him from appearing.

So why continue if the number still doesn’t come?

Part of it is the number itself, a rare move to become the only player in history with 25 Grand Slam singles titles. Records have driven Djokovic for too long to pretend otherwise.

But something quieter also started to matter.

For years he lived as the third name in a rivalry that emotionally belonged to Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. He won more than both, broke more records than either, yet rarely commanded the same affection. Respect came easily. Love often doesn’t.

It’s one of sport’s oldest ironies: sometimes greatness has to fade before people fully appreciate it.

That only started to change when the finish line came into view. Center court rose to him on Friday with a warmth he wouldn’t have known ten years ago. Each winner received applause. Each impossible fetch earned another roar. The crowd tried to make him fight another time.
It didn’t change the score.

At 39, that’s a question before him that requires as much defense as anything he’s ever produced with a racket in hand.

Should he continue?

The case for yes sits squarely in the results: four Grand Slam semi-finals last year, a final this year, now a semi-final in London, a man who still dismantles players half his tennis age without visible tension. The case against is equally clear: he can’t get past the two men who currently run the sport. Sinner and Alcaraz closed the door on him, then closed it again, then closed it a third time.

He explained the shift in his own thinking after Melbourne. Not long before that victory, he said that getting past the Big Two was unlikely. When he did, he corrected himself in real time: it’s not impossible. He did it in front of everyone. And yet, between them, Sinner and Alcaraz are still finding a way to keep a 25th match out of reach.

BLESSINGS AND CURSES

Djokovic has won five of his last seven matches against Sinner (Reuters Photo)

They keep coming. The rest of the journey never quite arrives. In his own words on Friday, it’s a blessing and a curse, refusing to sit apart.

“Last year I got to four semi-finals. This year I got to one final and one semi-final out of three slams. For 99% of players, that would be a very good Grand Slam result. For me, it’s not good enough. Because I’m blessed and cursed to be used to something of the highest level in terms of results and achievements. In a way, it looks like I’m also dealing with myself. titles,” he said.

It’s a strange kind of admission, a man who takes comfort in a version of success that would flatten most careers while refusing to accept it as sufficient for his own. He kept experiencing that exact tension out loud:

“But at the same time, I always have the highest expectations for myself. It’s kind of this internal struggle of what I’ve been through in my 20-plus years of career, what the goals, the expectations have been… and I’m also trying to balance that and try to be a little more humble in that sense. I still enjoy the thrill of the competition. Maybe I don’t enjoy all the hard weeks leading up to the big tournaments and putting myself through a lot of physical pain again.

“I’m glad the body held up pretty well in this tournament. It’s always been something in almost every other tournament the last few years. I feel like if I’m healthy, I can still play as a top 5 player, I’m still able to compete at the highest level. I like it. I like this life. Tennis has given me everything in life and given me the opportunity to become who I am.”

“At the same time, of course, there’s always the question of how far you want to go, what you want to play, how you want to play, etc. I’m trying to kind of take it day by day and see how I feel.”

“I don’t have any pressure or anyone forcing me to play. I’m doing it because I really want to and because I can still play as a top 5 player. We’ll see what the future brings.”

Novak Djokovic on the Wimbledon press after losing to Jannik Sinner

“Could you talk more about how you tried to deal with his serve? Everyone says you’re the best returner . . .”

Novak: “It was. It was. That’s reality. It was.”

pic.twitter.com/VjQIOmMJBM— The Tennis Letter (@TheTennisLetter) July 10, 2026

No pressure, no one forcing it, just a person who still wants it enough to pay full price for it. Call it, as he called it, a blessing and a curse. Not once did he try to separate the two. It’s a blessing that at 39, he’s still good enough to stand in the ring with the only two men who can deny him. The curse is that standing in the ring and winning it is no longer the same thing.

Sinner closed the door on Friday the way a door closes on a person who’s running out of Fridays.

But Djokovic will come back. Because the blessing and the curse of faith is that it never lets you stop.

– The end

Issued by:

Akshay Ramesh

Published on:

11 Jul 2026 10:32 IST