World No. 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic has pulled out of the 16-nation ATP team tournament with the Serbian national team and may miss the Australian Open after refusing to provide vaccination records for the coronavirus.
All players and staff at the upcoming Australian Open – the first Grand Slam tournament of the season – are required to be vaccinated, but the Serbian tennis player has not yet publicly announced whether he has received the COVID-19 vaccine or has decided to refuse it.
The tournament in Melbourne begins on January 17. Novak Djokovic has won nine of his twenty Grand Slam victories on Australian courts, including last year’s tournament. The situation has surprised tennis experts. The Serb has every chance of defending his title and surpassing his main rivals Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in terms of the number of trophies (currently, each of them has 20 Grand Slam victories).
Many believe that he would not hide his vaccination at the expense of his career, which means that for some reason the tennis player refuses the vaccination. At the moment it is known that Djokovic’s name is still on the list of participants for the Australian Open. However, 33-year-old Dusan Lajovic will represent Serbia in the team stage of the ATP. This tournament precedes the Australian Open and will start next Saturday in Sydney.
The Austrian team also pulled out of the tournament in full force after team leaders Dominic Thiem and Dennis Novak decided not to participate. The reasons are not yet known. The French team will replace Austria in the tournament, which originally did not qualify for the main draw.
In November this year, the father of the world’s number one tennis player, Srdjan Djokovic, did not give a direct answer on whether his son would be vaccinated, but did not rule out the possibility that he would skip the Australian Open. “As for vaccinated and unvaccinated people, everyone should decide for themselves whether to get vaccinated or not. No one has the right to violate the boundaries of our intimate space,” Serbian website B92 quoted him as saying. “Under such blackmail conditions [Djokovic] will probably not play. I wouldn’t play either. And he’s my son, so judge for yourself.”
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Previously, Djokovic made similar comments about mandatory vaccination. “Freedom of choice is very important for everybody, whether it’s me or somebody else,” the Tennis365 website quoted him as saying in an interview shortly before the Australian Open. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s about vaccination or something else in life. You should have the freedom to choose and decide for yourself what you want to do. In this particular case, it’s about deciding what to inject into your body.”
In the summer of 2020, Djokovic played a tennis tournament in Serbia, despite the strict quarantine measures in place around the world at the time. During the competition, he himself contracted the coronavirus, although the illness was reportedly asymptomatic. In addition to him, several other athletes and delegation members were infected. Djokovic was then criticized for the decision to hold the tournament during the ongoing pandemic. British tennis player Andy Murray said what happened should be a lesson to everyone, while Australian Nick Kyrgios said the decision to hold the tournament was foolish. In response to the criticism, Djokovic said on his website that he organized the tournament to unite people and promote the idea of solidarity. “Everything we have done in the last month, we have done from the bottom of our hearts and with sincere intentions. We organized the tournament at a time when the virus was weakening, confident that all the conditions were met,” said the world number one tennis player. “Unfortunately, the virus has not disappeared and in the new reality we have to learn how to deal with it and live with it”.