WIMBLEDON — With each match, each win, and each twist, step, and slide on the Wimbledon grass, June 5 feels a little further away.
That was the day last month that Novak Djokovic underwent surgery on his right knee, after tearing his medial meniscus during a French Open match against Francisco Cerundolo two days earlier. A match that he won. In five sets.
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Multiple surgeons looked at scans of the injury, and they told Djokovic that an operation was his only option.
The next day he posted a picture on social media, standing in Paris with his wife and his team, steadying himself with crutches, and then he was on a plane home to Belgrade. His road to playing at Wimbledon, a tournament then 25 days away, had already begun.
Most of the people standing with him in that photo thought it was ridiculous to even consider recovering in time for an event that he has won seven times. The more realistic goal figured to be the Olympics, set to start back in Paris on July 27. The Olympics is perhaps the only important tournament in the world where the ultimate prize has eluded Djokovic.
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Djokovic had other ideas. He focused on Wimbledon, feeling in his heart that something would be off with the universe if he had to miss it. Now, he has once again made the semifinals at the London event.
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This story of his comeback is based on Djokovic’s public statements and posts, alongside discussions with people with knowledge of his recovery process, who spoke anonymously so as not to compromise their relationships with the player’s inner circle.
A key part of that recovery was Djokovic’s willingness to consider that his team, close to him at all times and relied upon for their insights, might not have all the answers to his questions about how he could do something that appeared unthinkable.
Days after the operation, the surgeon who conducted the partial menisectomy on Djokovic, Antoana Geromete, told French news outlet L’Equipe that while the normal recovery time is three to six weeks, adding it would be difficult for his patient to be at 100 percent on the short side of that time frame.
The arthroscopic procedure uses a “duckbill punch” tool and shaver to excise and smooth the frayed edges of the torn portion of the meniscus, rather than conducting a full repair, which involves stitching the meniscus back together and requires the patient to spend multiple weeks afterwards in a knee brace.
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Most people took Geromete’s statement to mean that Djokovic would not be able to play Wimbledon.
Djokovic was not one of them.
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“I’m going to do my best to be healthy and fit to return to the court as soon as possible,” Djokovic said in a post on social media after the surgery. “My love for this sport is strong and the desire to compete at the highest level is what keeps me going.”
Love matters, but experience of both load management and the exertion of the two weeks of a Grand Slam matters more. Djokovic has long known that he can beat most players, especially in the early days of a tournament, while far from 100 percent. He also treats his body as a temple, likely giving himself a leg up when it comes to a quick recovery. Generally, doctors and trainers say, the healthier you are to begin with, the faster your recovery process can be.
Djokovic played compromised at the Australian Open in 2021, when he tore a muscle in his stomach midway through the tournament, but won it anyway.
He did it last year in Melbourne as well, when he suffered a small tear in his hamstring just ahead of the event. Organisers were fully prepared for him to pull out. Enter Marijana Kovacevic, a specialist in muscle regeneration, who worked with Djokovic on the days between his matches to prepare him for the next day. He barely hit a tennis ball on off-days. He hobbled through his first matches, improved through the second week, and won his 22nd Grand Slam title.
Ever since Djokovic showed up at the All England Club a week before the start of this year’s tournament, he has been thinking about his recovery process in a way few others would have. To make this venture worth his while, he did not need to be perfect, or even close to it, for his first-round match. He just had to be good enough to buy himself a little more time.
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To get to that point, Djokovic reached outside his regular circle of coaches and trainers for a specialist in knee rehabilitation, just as he had when he had that hamstring tear in Australia last year. Miljan Amanovic, a trainer and physiotherapist he has long worked with, is more of a generalist. Djokovic and his team felt someone who specialized in making knees stronger, quickly, could be helpful. Jean-Georges Cellier, a French physiotherapist who has previously worked with Richard Gasquet and AS Monaco, was drafted in to support Djokovic’s rehabilitation.
In both Belgrade in his Serbian homeland and Ljuta, a seaside village in neighboring Montenegro where he has a villa, Djokovic followed a regimented daily schedule of flexibility and training exercises that came with a series of goals he needed to surpass before he could move on. The 37-year-old would have been doing some version of stretching and practice anyway in the run-up to a Grand Slam, of course. What else was he going to do with his time?
He quickly progressed to balancing, walking slowly, walking faster, hopping, and moving side to side. In Belgrade on June 12, 19 days before Wimbledon, he underwent hyperbaric chamber treatment, which involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurised chamber and is believed to accelerate tissue recovery. Djokovic has well-established reputation for trying just about anything that might improve his physical state, from climbing into a pressurized egg pod to wearing a patch on his chest, likened to that of the Iron Man in the Marvel Universe, to assuage inflammation.
Had there been any setback along the way, he said he would have recalibrated and focused on the Olympics.
“If I had a day where my knee just flares up and I have swelling and inflammation, of course I would be slowing down; then my whole Wimbledon, this year’s participation, would be in doubt,” Djokovic said ahead of the ongoing grass-court tournament. “But that didn’t happen.”
Those 25 days did not all go smoothly.
Djokovic’s wife, Jelena, repeatedly asked him why he was doing this, potentially risking a final chance to win a so-far-elusive Olympic medal. He told her if there was any chance that he could make it to Wimbledon, he wanted to try for it.
He barely touched a racket at first, but when he did, he hit standing still, to test the strain on the wound. Then it was time to hit on the move, because no one plays tennis standing still. This is not pickleball.
First, he hit while moving three feet to each side and up and back. When that felt OK, he moved on to six feet in multiple directions, then nine, and then all the way out to the corners of the court.
Then it was time to start playing points, then games, and then sets with Daniil Medvedev — who he could now meet in the final on Sunday, with the Russian facing Carlos Alcaraz in the other semifinal — and Emil Ruusuvuori. He gave a thumbs-up to journalists at Wimbledon watching his Centre Court practice with Jannik Sinner on the eve of the tournament.
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Last Tuesday, on the 25th day, Djokovic walked out onto Centre Court for a first-round meeting with Vit Kopriva of the Czech Republic.
Wearing a long gray brace on his repaired right knee, he went about the match the same way he went about the rehabilitation process: baby steps at first, moving tentatively through points, limiting his bending. There were balls that he would have sprinted for before his injury. That day, he watched them bounce twice without giving chase.
Early in the second set, he ran and stretched for a ball to his right, sliding into it with most of his weight on his front leg, his right foot vibrating as it moved across the grass. The crowd gasped.
“First slide of the season,” he said later. He hadn’t done one in practice.
He beat Kopriva in straight sets.
It was more of the same in the second match against Jacob Fearnley, a Scot who played at the college level in the U.S. for Texas Christian University.
Fearnley forced Djokovic to rev his engine a little louder, pushing him to four sets. Djokovic looked awkward, particularly in losing the third set, struggling to explode into his serve and often landing jerkily and awkwardly out of the serving motion. He got through it anyway.
And by then, the world No 2 had decided to stop worrying about reinjuring the knee. He said he did not have the energy for it.
With all the rain at Wimbledon this year, he has largely played his matches under the roof on Centre Court.
That increases the humidity in the arena and can make the grass more slippery. Djokovic said he has been slipping less than in previous years, but that’s perhaps because he has been moving more tentatively. A silver lining, maybe.
In his fourth-round match against Holger Rune, though, it was time to throw caution to the wind. He was into the second week of Wimbledon once more, the point where you can start to smell the business end of the championship. Finally, nearly five weeks after he went under the knife, it was time to break out his famous splits.
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“Nothing really hurt me,” he reported later, after stuffing Rune in straight sets. “I’m really glad.”
Then, on Wednesday, Djokovic got his biggest break since the Wimbledon draw, which put him on the opposite side to both world No. 1 Jannik Sinner and defending champion Carlos Alcaraz. Alex de Minaur, his scheduled opponent in the last eight, had slid out to a ball on the full on Monday — just as Djokovic had in his first-round match — when match-point up against Arthur Fils. He lost the point. He felt a crack. De Minaur hobbled to the end, just two more points, stumbling on the winning volley to beat Fils. He withdrew on the morning of the quarterfinal, putting Djokovic straight into the semis.
Lorenzo Musetti of Italy will be on the other side of the net in that match. Djokovic is 5-1 against Musetti and will be playing in his 49th Grand Slam semifinal. His record is 36-12 in those matches. He has won 22 of his last 24.
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Asked about playing Djokovic on Wednesday, Musetti called his opponent a legend, with more expertise on Centre Court and on grass generally than anyone on the planet. He didn’t mention anything about Djokovic’s recent surgery.
By the time Djokovic takes to Centre Court tomorrow (Friday), he will have had three extra full days of rest and recovery, not just from the Rune match, but from his meniscus operation. He will be just days away from the six-week mark that Geromete, his surgeon, had earmarked as the long end of his recovery time, putting him in position to walk onto the court feeling close to 100 percent, at a tournament he is trying to win for the eighth time.
Djokovic didn’t need to be fully ready after 25 days. He just needed to buy himself some time.
(Top photo: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
