“I don’t know when the end will come for Novak, but the one thing I can say is that the end, when it does come, always comes fast. Those were Andre Agassi’s words, spoken on the Amazon documentary Novak Djokovic : The Wolf in Winter.
“I did, but then I won a set and then another. He won just one game in the last two sets as Mariano Navone of Argentina clawed back to pull off the unthinkable. This Djokovic was different. Chest heaving, towel pressed to his mouth, back aching, and the sound of the crowd softening into something between a groan and a hush. He didn’t quit. He rarely does. Amid the struggle, there was a glimpse of vintage Djokovic as he mounted a fightback across the next two sets. He believed. The crowd believed. But his body gave up, yet again. His back started aching, then his shoulder, his body could barely allow him to serve, which dropped into the mid-90s. By the fifth set, broken twice early, Djokovic stood behind the baseline and sobbed as the result turned inevitable. One could say so. That was enough to make him believe the 25th major wasn’t so far away.
It was all too much for the 39-year-old, and he later, in the flat, unadorned way he has taken to describing his body’s betrayals this year, admitted to even considering retiring from the match at the end of the first set. This was Djokovic’s earliest exit from a Grand Slam tournament in 20 years — the last coming at Melbourne Park, when he featured as an unseeded teenager nobody outside tennis had heard of. Since his last Grand Slam title, at the 2023 US Open, he came closest to number 25 at Wimbledon the following year, denied by Alcaraz. But 2025 was a testament to what Djokovic remained capable of even in his late 30s, with his old rivals gone from the scene — he reached the semifinals at all four majors, including a hamstring injury suffered mid-match in the Australian Open semifinal against Alexander Zverev that still didn’t stop him getting there. He took it one step further at the start of 2026, reaching the Australian Open final — a tournament he’s won a record ten times — only to fall to Alcaraz in four sets. And even that final defeat didn’t stop him from reiterating that the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics would be his swansong.
“Yes, I did, I did,” he said.
“The vomiting, the gagging, it’s a serious problem. Then my whole body started to give way, with cramps and pain. In the end, my back and shoulder also gave out, and I couldn’t finish the match the way I wanted. That scene in New York, those words to the media — they sound all too familiar. It was his first match since his Wimbledon semifinal loss to Sinner, before which he had admitted his body was in the best shape heading toward the US Open.
It was just 15 days earlier that Cincinnati had witnessed the same, as Djokovic went down in his opening match against Thiago Agustín Tirante: down on his knees, calling for a medical timeout, seen vomiting into a towel.
I was a break up in the fourth set, but I had already been struggling a lot from the fourth game onwards,” he said afterward, on what ailed him in the round-one loss. The reflection on court told a different story. What he told the media afterward sat somewhere between a confession and a shrug. “It’s just a condition that I have, health-wise, that has been bothering me for the past couple of years,” he said. “A lot of issues, especially when it is humid and it is hot.”
