Through the Olympic Video games in Tokyo, Novak Djokovic provides the Serbian three-finger salute after his victory over Kei Nishikori, in 2021 © Tiziana Fabi / ANP
Because the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian tennis gamers resembling Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev have been taking part in worldwide matches with out mentioning their nationality. A white flag seems behind their names.
On the Video games, will probably be the identical. And that’s the place it stands out. Not in tennis, truly. In few sports activities do nationalities matter as little as in tennis. It’s a person and worldwide sport, with tournaments everywhere in the world, from Dubai to Houston and Rosmalen. Okay, there’s the Davis Cup, with matches through which the perfect gamers from international locations compete in opposition to one another. However that sequence of matches doesn’t examine in status to tournaments resembling Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open.
That isn’t to say that there are not any nationalists amongst tennis gamers. There was as soon as a participant, the Brazilian Gustavo Kuerten, who got here onto the courtroom sporting the identical colors as his nation’s soccer workforce. (A poser, and luckily one with out imitation.) After which there’s the previous world primary, the present quantity two Novak Djokovic. He has repeatedly raised his thumb, index and center finger within the air after yet one more received match.
Djokovic sees it in another way. In accordance with him, it’s ‘an emblem that the folks of our nation have used through the years when they’re profitable and after they need to present the place they arrive from’.
Djokovic is from Serbia. His father is a Serb from Kosovo, when it was an autonomous province of Yugoslavia. When Kosovo declared independence in 2008 – nearly a decade after Milošević’s ethnic cleaning and the NATO bombing of Belgrade – Djokovic made a video through which he declared: “Kosovo is Serbia” and “we’re able to defend what’s ours”. 4 years in the past, he had a photograph taken of himself holding up a bottle of brandy with a picture of Draža Mihailović on it, the person who led the Serbian Chetniks throughout World Conflict II. After the conflict, he was convicted of conflict crimes and executed in Tito’s Yugoslavia. In 2015, the Serbian authorities formally overturned the conviction.
In the meantime, Mihailović’s portrait additionally adorns fridge magnets, as I noticed final week after I visited Belgrade. In each memento stand there are the identical males (not one lady): Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Gavrilo Princip (, the Serbian murderer of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a Serbian common convicted in The Hague whose identify I all the time overlook and sure, Novak Djokovic, with a tennis racket. ‘All the nice guys collectively’, the memento vendor mentioned as I studied his show maybe just a little too lengthy. I questioned if the West, or quite we, knew on the time that the heavy bombing of Belgrade would result in such a everlasting sense of victimhood. That within the globally flaring identification conflict, Serbia would throw the mantle of Dr. Julius No round its shoulders and have fun anybody who, for no matter purpose, places a spoke within the wheel of the West. Snowden as a fridge magnet…
Memento stand in Belgrade, with Djokovic within the center © Pieter van Os
Immediately I discovered it utterly comprehensible that Novak Djokovic refused to be vaccinated in opposition to covid. And I understood, in these few July days in Belgrade, how necessary the Olympic Video games are for a person like Djokovic. As a result of not like Wimbledon or another tennis match, you actually win a medal in your nation there.
Remarkably, he has solely managed to do that as soon as. A bronze medal, in Tokyo. It hangs subsequent to the knighthoods, certificates and different awards he obtained from Milorad Dodik, probably the most highly effective politician within the Republika Srpska (RS), the Serbian republic of Bosnia, led by fanatical nationalist Serbs.
It is probably not good to hope somebody loses, however I permit myself this rudeness in relation to nationalist Novak ‘Nole’ Djokovic. I would quite have a winner and not using a flag, irrespective of the place he was born.
