by Chris Bowers
Even if Djokovic is very much a sporting statesman, it’s easy to forget that, for all his worldly wisdom, he’s still only midway through the third decade of his life. And sometimes a lack of experience in broader issues catches up with him. One such instance came at the end of 2013, when he launched a scathing attack on tennis’s governing bodies in defence of his friend and Davis Cup team-mate Viktor Troicki. Djokovic showed himself to be very eloquent, but at times his emotions got in the way of clear thinking.
Troicki had been suspended earlier in the year for 18 months for failing to provide a blood sample at the Monte Carlo Masters in April. He claimed he had a life-long fear of needles, which was exacerbated when he was unwell. As he said he was unwell in Monte Carlo and said he had suffered the effects of strong sun, he asked the Doping Control Officer responsible for his blood and urine tests whether he could forego his blood test, as he feared he would faint. He claims she said yes but changed her story later. She said she never gave him any such assurance and warned him he could face sanctions if he didn’t do his blood test that day. On examining the case, tennis’s anti-doping authorities said missing a test was a serious breach of the regulations, and they banned him for just six months less than if he had taken the blood test and been found positive for a banned substance. Troicki appealed to the Court for Arbitration in Sport (CAS), which delivered its ruling during the ATP World Tour Finals in London.
The CAS judged that Troicki was at fault, but found that the Doping Control Officer in Monte Carlo could have sought the assistance of an ATP official to help persuade Troicki to provide the sample. It therefore concluded the sentence was a little too harsh and reduced it from 18 months to 12. But that was of little consolation to Djokovic. Not only was his friend deprived of a full year of his professional career but Serbia was deprived of one of its Davis Cup players for the following week’s final at home to the Czech Republic. The Serbs could have won without Troicki as long as Janko Tipsarevic was fit, but Djokovic knew Tipsarevic was in a race against time to recover from his heel injury and was in serious danger of missing the final. Troicki’s ban was therefore a serious setback for Serbia.
The CAS judgement was delivered on the day Djokovic played Roger Federer in London, and the former’s post-match press conference was rife with anticipation about how he would respond to the confirmation of Troicki’s ban. Normally in post-match press conferences, the player walks in, sits down, takes questions and walks out at the end. This one was different. After the usual questions about Djokovic’s victory against Federer, he was asked whether he had any comments to make about the judgement. Djokovic reached for his pocket, took out some notes and proceeded to speak for seven minutes uninterrupted. It was highly impressive, but the eloquence gradually gave way to emotion and he left himself open to attack on several fronts.
Djokovic outlined his grievance as follows:
It’s very bad news that we got for him [Troicki], and for me, for all of us who are close to him. But I think it’s just not bad news for him, it proves again that this system of Wada [World Anti-Doping Agency] does not work. Why am I saying that? Because, first of all, as a tennis pro, our job is to play tennis and respect all the rules and know all the rules of our sport. But when you are randomly selected to go and provide the test – blood test or urine test – the representatives of Wada who are there at the tournament are supposed to give you the clear indications and explain [to] you the rules and regulations and what the severe consequences or penalties [are] that you might undertake or you might have if you fail to provide the test. The representative didn’t do that in his case. So first, he’s not positive on any banned substance. I’m not saying that it’s completely not his fault, but … she did not clearly present him [with] all the severe consequences that he will have if he avoids that. She told him that he needs to write a report and that he will be just fine. And because of her negligence and because of her unprofessionalism, he is now off the tour for one year. And now it makes me nervous as a player to do any kind of test.
Djokovic was effectively seizing on one element of the judgement to make it sound as if the whole process was a lottery. The CAS’s judgement did indeed say that the Doping Control Officer might have misled Troicki by suggesting he write to the ITF setting out his reason for not wanting to take the blood test – the CAS said this ‘led him erroneously to believe that she was confident that the outcome would be positive’ – and that she failed in her duty to ‘always ensure that there is no possible misunderstanding involved’ and that she should ‘always encourage the athlete to proceed with the doping control’ by making him understand ‘perhaps with some persuasion […] the importance of following the procedures’. But it also said there was no objective justification for Troicki failing to provide a blood test and added that Troicki’s memory was ‘coloured by his subsequent reconstruction of events’. So Djokovic was judging the whole case on Troicki’s version of his conversation with the Doping Control Officer, a version that had been thrown into doubt by the judicial body looking at every detail of the case. Accusing a professional of ‘negligence’ and ‘unprofessionalism’ on that evidence is skating on thin ice.
He also said Troicki’s decision to take a blood test the following day – a test that was found to be clear – showed that Troicki had not committed any offence. But that doesn’t hold water, as there is the potential for substances to show up in a blood test one day that would not show up the next day, so giving the blood sample at the time it’s requested is a crucial part of the integrity of the anti-doping process.
Djokovic was honest enough to admit that Troicki was ‘a very good friend of mine’, someone he had known since the age of eight, and that this meant he was ‘emotionally connected’ to the case. Perhaps for that reason the tennis world appeared happy to accept that Djokovic had gone into bat for a friend, and that, if his defence of Troicki was passionate to the point of not being rock-solid, well, that’s what sometimes happens when you see your first loyalty as being to your friend and team-mate. But he was probably more than a little shocked when, later the same week, both Roger Federer and Andy Murray totally rejected Troicki’s defence – Federer said that, when a player is asked for a sample, he or she has to give it, and Murray said Troicki had been ‘unprofessional’ not to undergo the blood test and while he had some sympathy for the player’s position he had no sympathy for his argument.
No one should have too much of a dig at Djokovic for taking one element of the CAS’s judgement and trying to maximise its impact. That is the staple of politicians and lawyers fighting their corner in the face of inconvenient evidence to the contrary. But he has to be careful about fighting for a friend so hard that he risks undermining the credibility of tennis’s anti-doping measures. He himself is a man who has taken fitness, endurance and recovery at the top of the game to new levels, but he will only receive credit and respect for that if his sport is seen to be clean. He will be aware of athletes, cyclists and performers from other sports whose achievements have never quite received the recognition they deserve because of the drug-induced exploits of their predecessors, so as one of the leading proponents of tennis Djokovic has a duty to make sure the image of a clean sport is not undermined.
Where the emotions really took over was in his subsequent attack on the ATP. He said, ‘The ATP, who is supposed to be an association of players, of tennis professionals, who is supposed to be the governing body, the association that stands behind the players, is not going to answer on this announcement, is not going to do anything for Viktor.’ He went on, ‘The system [in the ATP’s governance] is so complicated, and it’s not working for players because the ATP is 50 per cent players, 50 per cent tournaments. So every time you want to vote for something, you need a majority, which is impossible because you’re going against tournaments. Players have no energy or time to spend on these things. We don’t have time for politics. The structure right now doesn’t go in favour of players.’
This is serio
usly flawed argumentation on many fronts. For a start, it seems to assume the players are more important than the tournaments – true, the tournaments can’t function without players, but then players can’t function without tournaments, so the two have to work together. Secondly, if he says he has no time for politics, he has to trust those who do – that is a law of life, not just of tennis. Oddly, he has been involved in tennis politics. He is a former member of the ATP Player Council and is very close to Ivan Ljubicic, a former president of the council who tried to tackle the alphabet soup of tennis’s governing bodies. It means that any attack on the ATP is an attack on himself as a member of the ATP. And it was a little tacky to issue a stinging attack on the ATP at the ATP’s flagship tournament of the year – it’s not quite like insulting the host who has invited you to dinner, but he might have chosen another moment, especially as his beef was with the Doping Control Officer and the Court for Arbitration in Sport, not primarily with any of tennis’s governing bodies.
Despite the holes that can be shot through his argument, Djokovic came away from his outburst on behalf of Troicki with his reputation for eloquence enhanced. He had made the point very clearly that, whatever the rights and wrongs of tennis’s anti-doping regime, he and other players felt vulnerable to being caught out by the system while trying to play strictly by its rules. And he had made the point that if a player doesn’t play strictly by the rules he (or she) can lose a year of their career, whereas when a Doping Control Officer doesn’t play strictly by the rules there appears to be no sanction against them. There were many who felt this was a tennis administrator of the future in the making. At the time he made his comments, the ATP had still not replaced the late Brad Drewett as its chairman and chief executive, which heightened the sense that Djokovic might one day be appropriate for the role. At 26, he could be forgiven for being politically wet behind the ears, or for putting the interests of a childhood friend ahead of a coherent argument. In the long term, however, a greater appreciation for the complexities of governance will be needed.
Interestingly, he didn’t mention the International Tennis Federation in his monologue about Troicki, despite being known to harbour resentments about certain decisions taken by the ITF. Perhaps this was a bit of Realpolitik, based on the fact that the ITF owns and runs the Davis Cup and the following week he was to be the star act in the Davis Cup final in his home city of Belgrade. Ultimately, Serbia lost a strange final in which all five matches were decided in straight sets and Serbia’s inability to parade Troicki and Tipsarevic cost the hosts dear. At the trophy-presentation ceremony, Djokovic shook the hand of the ITF president Francesco Ricci Bitti and smiled at him, but he and Tipsarevic were the only members of the Serbian team not to show up at the official Davis Cup dinner later that night. It would be too strong to say they boycotted the dinner, but it was certainly a silent protest.
Health problems in the family of Marian Vajda caused a rethink in the Djokovic team in the latter part of 2013. Vajda made it clear he didn’t want to be on the road as much, so he and Djokovic discussed who might come in as a new principal coach, albeit with Vajda still heavily involved. The choice they made took the tennis world by surprise: Boris Becker.
Becker had spent most of his time since retiring in the late 1990s as a television pundit. The complexities of his private life, which included fathering a child from a one-night stand in the broom cupboard of a London restaurant, had made him into a celebrity figure of constant discussion and speculation but hardly one of the world’s movers and shakers. A man of great charm and immense charisma, he attracted attention wherever he went, especially in his native Germany where he is something of a deity, but also in Great Britain, partly because he had a home in Wimbledon. But his comments on tennis were not widely viewed as profound, and a feature of many of his pronouncements was the constant presence of his ego. As he had never coached a touring professional before, the tennis world wondered what Becker would be able to say to Djokovic.
The official line from Djokovic was that Becker would be helping with the mental aspect of Djokovic’s game, specifically how to handle the big points in the big matches. In some ways, this made sense – Djokovic had lost a number of big matches he arguably should have won, such as the 2012 French Open final, the 2012 Wimbledon semi-final, the 2013 French semi, the 2013 Wimbledon final and the 2012 and 2013 US Open finals. Becker is one of the few people who knows how to turn a match round that is slipping away and how to win the big titles. But can he impart this knowledge? That was the unknown quantity and was still unknown as this book went to press.
It was easy to make fun of the arrangement when it was announced. Becker had had an awful 2013, with various personal problems and ballooning weight following an ankle problem that required surgery. And with Andy Murray having hired Ivan Lendl in 2012 and Roger Federer hiring Stefan Edberg, Marin Cilic hiring Goran Ivanisevic and Kei Nishikori hiring Michael Chang, all in late 2013, it seemed like a draft of the big names of the 1980s and 1990s that Djokovic didn’t want to miss out on.
Their first outing together didn’t bode well. Djokovic lost his Australian Open winning streak in the quarter-finals, his 25-match unbeaten run at Melbourne Park ending with a 9–7 final-set defeat to Stanislas Wawrinka. The defeat looked a little better five days later when Wawrinka lifted the trophy – his first Grand Slam title was assisted by a back injury to Rafael Nadal in the final, but Wawrinka was playing well enough to have won the trophy even without the help of Nadal’s back. And by the end of the fortnight in Melbourne, the relationship seemed to have sent out the message that it was serious and not some kind of publicity stunt.
So why did Djokovic hire Becker? The reason given has some credibility, although much will depend on whether Becker can pass on his experience and on-court presence to someone else. Djokovic greeted Becker with a request to speak German with him so he could freshen up his command of the language; with Djokovic living for much of the year in Monaco where he speaks French (he has a dog called Pierre, so one assumes he speaks French to the dog), and speaking Italian with his manager Edoardo Artaldi, it’s easy to joke that he picks his team on the basis of which languages he can add to his collection. But there may be two deeper-lying reasons for his choice of Becker.
What was clear in Melbourne at their first tournament together was that the appointment of Becker had created a buzz around Djokovic that wasn’t there before. His practice sessions were suddenly sought-after events, even though Becker was doing little more than feeding tennis balls to a hitting partner because he was still recovering from his ankle surgery (he had lost a few kilos and had worked out a training programme, so the German was clearly taking the arrangement seriously and benefiting from it personally). Questions abounded in Djokovic’s press conferences about Becker and he even acceded to a request from Jim Courier in an on-court interview to perform his impersonation of Becker after a victory on the Rod Laver Arena – the rocking service motion performed under Becker’s eyes brought the house down. If the leading three figures in world tennis all need an image to sustain their profile, Federer is the stylish traditionalist, Nadal the physical bull, while Djokovic is something of the amiable professor. But Djokovic’s image doesn’t translate as easily as the other two, and the world doesn’t always get his blend of the heart-pumping warrior and the Tolstoyesque philosopher. Having Becker in his camp certainly gave him a popular standing that he didn’t have with Vajda.
Whether that is enough reason on its own to hire the German is doubtful, but the Serbian tennis journalist Vojin Velickovic offers another possible reason. ‘People think Igor Cetojevic gave Novak only the gluten-free diet,’ he says, ‘but I talked to him and he believed he gave Novak two things: the diet and a form of conversation that is very important to Novak. He likes to work things out, to think them through, and I think Cetojevic was able to have conversations with him that gave him a very clear mind going into matches. Maybe he has missed that and the relationship with Boris is a chance to h
ave these conversations and prepare his mindset before matches?’
Becker may also be able to help with things like tournament planning. At the end of a punishing 2013, Djokovic played several exhibition matches in South America with Nadal and then played no official warm-up tournaments for the Australian Open. Much as it would have helped his bank balance and his profile in Latin America, it may have left him short of match practice for the Grand Slam at which he has been most successful. Becker is likely to be stricter on tournament planning at the end of 2014. It’s clear the future of the Djokovic-Becker partnership hangs on several factors,
including perhaps Vajda’s willingness to travel if his family situation
becomes more conducive.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A ‘GIVING’ PERSON
In October 2013 Serbia’s national airline JAT (Yugoslav Air Transport) signed a deal with the Abu Dhabi airline Etihad for Etihad to buy a 49 per cent stake in JAT and run the Serbian carrier. Part of the deal was that JAT would be rebranded as Air Serbia. It included a new logo to grace all the tail fins, a variation of the Serbian double-headed eagle. That symbol from Serbian heraldry had become associated with Serbia’s reputation as an aggressor in the 1990s wars, so the fact that it was the basis of the new Air Serbia logo showed perhaps that the Serbs were becoming less coy about using some traditional symbols from their country’s cultural heritage.