In the minutes after Novak Djokovic lost as he has never lost before at the U.S. Open, the greatest male player of tennis’ modern era spoke about his attempts to conquer whatever it is that has been leaving him depleted and vomiting on the court on several occasions this season.
“I’m trying, man, I’m trying,” he said in a hallway underneath Arthur Ashe Stadium. “Let’s see.”
The opening night of the 2026 tournament was unlike any other in Djokovic’s career. He nearly gave up, he said, early in a five-set loss to Argentina’s Mariano Navone, the world No. 49.
Instead, the 39-year-old played on. He swallowed pills to settle his stomach and manage his cramps. He cried on the court in the middle of a game — perhaps from pain; perhaps from the increasing futility of seeing through a match that had been gone for hours.
Or, for the first time, Djokovic was seeing what his tennis mortality might look like at one of the few tournaments for which he is still playing the sport at all. The extraordinary longevity that has earned him 24 Grand Slam titles has also made him the only serious rival to Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, the two players taking over the top of men’s tennis. That he is still on the court at all, let alone putting himself in the conversation for tennis’ biggest titles, is in many ways beyond measure.
Nothing about Djokovic’s dedication to routine, to recovery, to priming his body as much as he can for as long as he can and at the right times, has changed in the past two years. That’s how long he says a medical condition — that he has not disclosed — has been sapping his energy and making him even more susceptible to heat and humidity than he already was.
It is the passing of time that is undoing him, those years and the near five hours he spent in Arthur Ashe Stadium against Navone, with close to 24,000 fans watching in an atmosphere that turned funereal in the fourth and fifth sets.
For Djokovic, it had been funereal since the fourth game. The sight of his struggling left Carlos Alcaraz, who had a match that afternoon but caught some of Djokovic’s afterward, stunned.
“A big surprise, to be honest,” Alcaraz said in a news conference. “Someone like Novak going out in the tournament, you know, in the first round, it’s surprising.”
Ultimately, Djokovic is managing something that everyone experiences: aging. Great athletes experience it more keenly than most in their sunset years; ultimately, no one can topple it. He is also trying to figure out where tennis, and all the things he does to make that tennis the best it can possibly be, fits into his life.
After years of playing 70 matches a year all over the world, the hours of training and recovery before and after and the endless travel, Djokovic also wants to be present as a father to his two children.
He has played just 21 matches this season, 16 of them across the four Grand Slam events. Except in rare instances when players are at the peak of their powers, there is only one way to get into shape for tennis matches, which is to play tennis matches.
When he was at the peak of his powers, Djokovic could time his surges like no one else, using early-round matches like the one against Navone to groove his groundstrokes and elasticate his limbs.