Djokovic in tears during US Open first-round exit

⏱ 4 min read • 1,008 words

By Ahmad Ali, Sports Editor

Novak Djokovic sat slumped in his chair on Arthur Ashe Stadium, a towel over his head and his shoulders shaking, as the clock passed four and a half hours and the most durable body in tennis history finally refused to answer. The 39-year-old Serb, seeded fourth and a four-time champion in New York, was beaten 7-6 (7-5), 5-7, 4-6, 6-2, 6-1 by Argentina’s Mariano Navone on Sunday — the first opening-round defeat of his career at the US Open, and the first at any Grand Slam since the 2006 Australian Open.

It took four hours and 36 minutes, and for most of them Djokovic was visibly unwell. He called for the tournament doctor after the ninth game of the opening set and was handed tablets. He vomited into a towel bin. He took a lower-back massage between sets, and by the fifth set was moving in short, careful steps, a man managing damage rather than chasing a match. An eerie hush settled over a stadium that had watched him win 19 first-round matches without ever losing one.

‘My whole body starts to collapse’

Djokovic was blunt afterwards about what has been happening to him, and about how long it has been going on.

“It’s something that I have been carrying pretty much every match this year — vomiting, throwing up,” he said. “And then my whole body starts to collapse basically, cramping and pain. The back just gave up in the end, and shoulder, and I couldn’t close it out.” He described the underlying problem as “serious” and said he was still “trying to address really what’s going on”.

On the tennis itself, he offered no excuses and no comfort. “I didn’t enjoy myself. I think it was obvious that it was an awful feeling on the court for me,” he said. “I don’t want to take too much out of Mariano’s win. Congrats to him, he’s a nice guy and a fighter.”

The scoreboard told the story of a body giving out rather than a game breaking down. Djokovic lost the first set on a tie-break, then fought back to take the second and third — the competitive instinct that has defined him for two decades briefly overriding everything else. Then came the collapse: he won three games in the last two sets combined. Of his 70 unforced errors, 29 arrived after the third set, while Navone won 63.3% of points across the closing hour.

Records two decades in the making

The numbers that fell on Sunday night were not ordinary ones.

Djokovic had won 78 consecutive Grand Slam first-round matches — a streak stretching back 20 years.
He had never lost before the third round at the US Open in his career, arriving 19-0 in New York openers.
His previous opening-round exit at a major came at the 2006 Australian Open, when he was 18 years old.
Victory would have given him a 43rd career win from five sets.
The defeat extends his run to 12 consecutive majors without a title, equalling the longest barren spell of his career, from 2005 to 2007.

That last statistic is the one that will sting hardest. Djokovic has spent three years chasing a 25th Grand Slam singles title, the outright record he has framed as the point of continuing. This season he reached the Australian Open final — losing to Carlos Alcaraz, and a runner-up in Melbourne for the first time — went out in the third round at Roland Garros and made the Wimbledon semi-finals. Sunday was not a slow decline. It was a cliff edge.

Navone’s night, and a draw torn open

For the winner, this was a career remade in a single evening. Navone, 25 and ranked No. 49 in the world, won his first ATP title in April at the Tiriac Open in Bucharest and had never beaten a top-10 player at a major. He held his nerve through two sets in which Djokovic looked, briefly, like the old machine.

“For sure it’s the best thing I’ve had on court,” Navone said. “This is an amazing court and the biggest stage.”

His reward is a quarter of the draw suddenly stripped of its anchor. With world No. 1 Jannik Sinner absent through a knee injury and Alcaraz returning from a wrist problem, a tournament already short on certainties has lost the one man always guaranteed to be there in week two. Elsewhere on day one, third seed Jessica Pegula, seventh seed Daniil Medvedev and 11th seed Marta Kostyuk all advanced comfortably.

What happens now

Djokovic announced nothing on Sunday, and it would be wrong to write his ending for him — he has been prematurely buried more often than any player of his era, and has answered every time. But the tone was different. Asked about his record of achievement, he said simply: “Of course, I’ve been very proud of all the achievements in the past, but now is now.”

The tears were the tell. Djokovic has cried in New York before, but in triumph. This was something else: the recognition, in real time and in public, that the physical superiority which underwrote everything — the returns, the slides, the fifth-set records — is no longer reliably available to him. Whatever he decides about 2027, a chapter closed on Sunday night, and it did not close gently.

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