Even aggrieved, Novak Djokovic is the face of Serbia

‘Who is a fan of Novak Djokovic?’ Twenty-five fingers shoot eagerly into the air. His name alone causes great excitement in the third grade of the Boris Stankovic school in a deep gray suburb of Belgrade. ‘My father knows Djokovic!’ a boy shouts proudly. Director Rada Rakocevic, a chatty woman in her fifties with nails painted bright blue, looks on with amusement.

Her school is a stone’s throw from the brutalist block of flats where the best tennis player in the world spent much of his childhood. His grandfather lived there, Djokovic hid there in 1999 as a 12-year-old in the basement during the two months that NATO bombed Serbia. And he himself went to school in this concrete low-rise building, if he wasn’t training.

In the hall, director Rakocevic has had a large mural made of all the famous students, which she points out one by one. Djokovic’s face is the largest and even outshines that of national poet Boris Stankovic, the school’s namesake. “We adore Djokovic. He is a great ambassador for his country.”

The vaccination scandal in Australia does not change that, says director Rakocevic resolutely. The rest of the world might be surprised by Djokovic’s dogged battle with the Australian government, which withdrew his Australian Open travel visa on arrival because he was not vaccinated. Since that soap opera, he has only played three games, but in Serbia the Djokovic love has not diminished. He is looking forward to his return next week in Monaco.

“Love can’t be bigger,” laughs Ana Jovanovic (37), sporting director of the tennis center of Djokovic’s foundation. Through the restaurant window, she watches construction workers build a grandstand around the main of the five brand new tennis courts, all at the expense of ‘Nole’, as his nickname is affectionately here. “Novak is not diplomatic,” Jovanovic says of the riot in Australia, “He says what he thinks, even though everyone is against him. We are proud of that in Serbia.’

New golden generation

In the park right next to the bank of the Danube, Djokovic wants to train a new golden tennis generation, with better facilities than he had as a child. The modern restaurant with large glass windows is a stark contrast to the old concrete Yugoslav sports center next door.

Jovanovic is also a former tennis pro, her highest ATP ranking was 216. She is slightly older than 34-year-old Djokovic, but the class of top tennis players in small Belgrade grew up together and often met each other. Jovanovic and Djokovic are good friends, their families also became friends.

His parents Srdjan and Diana met each other in the mountains. Father Djokovic, a former professional skier, was teaching skiing there, his mother was training as a sports teacher when the two met. In front of their business were tennis courts, where little Novak was introduced to the sport by accident.

While his parents worked in the mountains, Djokovic and his brothers spent a lot of time in the gray suburb of Belgrade with their grandfather. On the communist block where he lived, there is now a large mural with the faces of Djokovic, his father and his first coach, Jelena Gencic, who recognized the talent in him.

Besides Djokovic, their contemporaries Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic also achieved the number 1 position in the women’s world ranking, Jovanovic sums up in the brand new tennis center. Among the men, Viktor Troicki and Janko Tipsarevic made it to the worldwide top-10.

An impressive list for a small country like Serbia, which has no tennis tradition at all. According to Jovanovic, it is no coincidence that these athletes, who grew up in the 1990s, developed into the golden generation.

As children, they saw the country in which they were born, Yugoslavia, fall apart with much bloodshed. Serbia – at the time still the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – waged wars against Bosnia and Kosovo, killing tens of thousands of civilians. The international community punished the country with economic sanctions, which led to severe poverty among the Serb population.

There were also restrictions on sports: in 1992 and 1994 Yugoslavia was not allowed to participate in the Olympic Games due to UN sanctions. When the basketball team – national sport number 1 – again took part in international competitions in 1995, it immediately won the European title. The following year, silver followed at the Atlanta Games.

There is a link between the success and the sanctions, Jovanovic is convinced of that. “All athletes hungered for competition after those years. We wanted to show the world that we Serbs are worth no less.’ Djokovic also possesses that mentality, behind which aggravation forms a strong engine. Everyone is against us, but we will prove them wrong on the sports field, is the thought.

By the same reasoning, father Djokovic even compared his son to Jesus Christ, when Novak was detained for days in Australia because of the revoked visa. Because as extreme as that comparison may sound, many Serbs agree with the tenor: in their eyes Djokovic was a martyr, sacrificed on the Australian covid altar. While Djokovic was stuck in Australia, fans took to the streets for him in Belgrade.

Political Symbol

Even Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic chose Djokovic’s camp in January, accusing the Australian government of lying, saying during the trial that fewer than half of Serbs are vaccinated, when in fact the percentage is 58 percent.

Upon returning to Serbia, Djokovic was received like a hero and went on an official visit to the right-wing president. The relationship between Djokovic and Vucic was not always so good – in December the tennis player still supported major environmental protests against the government – ​​but during the vaccination affair there was a common enemy, and then the Serbian ranks quickly close.

That also has to do with the shared suffering from the 1990s, thinks former coach Bogdan Obradovic. “And Novak has suffered a lot. His family was poor, like everyone else. We had no salary, no gas, nothing.’

From his sleek apartment, on the ninth floor of a newly built skyscraper, he gestures proudly to the neighborhood under construction around him. “This is the new Belgrade. Novak is so popular because he is the face of the new era in Serbia.’

Obradovic himself has felt distance from his pupil for a few years, with whom he worked for eighteen years and won the Davis Cup in 2010. “Novak has changed since he became number one.” For example, the tennis player does not take a vaccine, but likes to visit ‘energy pyramids’ in Bosnia for his health.

Former coach Obradovic also denounces the tennis player’s vegan diet – ‘What else can you offer someone to eat or drink?’ – and proposes a popular explanation in Serbia for Djokovic’s alternative tendencies: the influence of his wife Jelena.

In Djokovic’s own restaurant Novak, a few kilometers away, the menu is anything but vegan, because the cash register has to keep ringing in meat-loving Serbia. Among Djokovic’s photos and trophies, businessmen and tourists gulp down their lunches. Near the door is a life-size sculpture of Djokovic, dressed as a medieval warrior, with tennis racket in hand.

Criticism of Djokovic in Serbia is limited to a small group of investigative journalists. They point out that for its construction projects – the new tennis center, but also other real estate investments in Belgrade – the Djokovic family really gets everything done from municipal politics.

The fact that Djokovic sang a right-wing nationalist song after winning the ATP cup with Serbia in 2020 also slips effortlessly from him in the public opinion. The same applies to the photo from 2021, in which the tennis player can be seen with an ex-commander of a paramilitary group, who took part in the genocide in Srebrenica. The pattern makes Djokovic known in other Balkan countries as Serbia’s national ambassador, but in a negative sense.

In group 3 of the Boris Stankovic school, the allegations of corruption and far-right nationalism are far away. Here everyone wants to become Novak Djokovic in the future, and at the very least take a picture with him when he comes by, as janitor Petar proudly shows on his phone. “He is a family man,” director Rakocevic declares approvingly. “Novak respects Serbian patriarchal values.”

In her director’s room at his old elementary school hangs a framed photograph of the tennis player, just below a portrait of Marshal Tito. The former president, who died in 1980, is still popular in the former Yugoslavia, as a nostalgic reminder of the time before the bloody split. ‘At first foreigners thought of Tito when thinking of Serbia, but later that unfortunately became Milosevic’, says Rakocevic. “Now we’ve washed him away with Novak Djokovic.”