A golden moment in history
Novak Djoković lands Serbia a welcome break in Paris
I didn’t want to write again about Novak Djoković – but today I changed my mind.
The backflip wasn’t just because Djoković landing Olympic Gold in Paris was outstanding tennis. Anyone who loves that beautiful game – it is the only sport I truly adore, I can still close my eyes and see Andre Agassi smashing to Wimbledon victory in 1992 – was holding their breath as Djoković come up against Carlos Alacraz, to whom he’s lost the last two Wimbledon championships. Alcaraz is a genius player in his own right, and an exciting member of the next generation of tennis giants I hope we’ll enjoy for many years to come.
I decided to watch this tennis in the Serbian countryside, in a hotel near my village house. Deliberately, that house has no television to minimise distractions. Fortunately right now, the hotel has hired a giant screen for viewing Olympic everything. This house and hotel are in Vojvodina, about an hour from Belgrade. Vojvodina is where my late father was born, and it’s where my grandparents landed as colonists near the Romanian border after leaving Croatia around a century ago. The land here is extraordinarily flat and (as the former Pannonian sea, now drained to a plain) unusually fertile. The people here are a complex mix of ethnicities, which according to much Western imagination might be a recipe for stereotypical Balkan conflict – but fortunately tends to deliver the opposite.
Match-ready, I arrive highly anxious only to be told by the very young and polite waiter, who is from this village, not to worry at all because clearly Djoković will win 2 sets ništa. This waiter is as zen as our landscape. (So normally is Djoković, if I think about it – which is kind of interesting as he was born in hyper-wired Belgrade and as a child lived through the NATO bombing of his home city for three months in 1999, maybe that makes for a different species of zen). Sure I say, but sit biting my nails –surrounded by an elegant extended family from babies to babas having Sunday lunch, a cute couple with a lapdog that yaps every time the crowd goes silent, and a bunch of twenty-something blokes yelling hajde bre! and downing litres of Coca-Cola.
So Djoković takes the first set and the babas go a little bit wild. Having lived through many decades of economic and political disruption – spanning most of their lives – they understand better than most, how much Serbia needs a real win at the moment. Forget (the babas won’t) the catastrophe that was the 1990s. Its hyperinflation, its devastating wars, international sanctions (including sporting and Olympic sanctions against the ex-Yugoslavia), the departure of many of Serbia’s best and brightest (still mainly offshore, like insanely overqualified gastarbeiters, they tend only to come home for weddings, baptisms and funerals), its reception of waves of internally displaced people from across the former Yugoslavia. Serbia’s need for good news is obvious even if you take a tighter, closer frame.
Just last year the nation was rocked by the shooting murder on 3 May of nine children and a security guard at an academically elite elementary school in central Belgrade, by a 13 year old boy who borrowed the gun of his well-known medical professional father for the purpose. This quickly tipped into months of mass street demonstrations in major Serbian cities under the banner slogan Serbia Against Violence, some in Belgrade involving hundreds of thousands of people. These demonstrations – there was also a very large counter-gathering of government supporters, bussed into the capital from across wider Serbia – were associated with a medley of opposition parties, who failed to win elections across Serbia last December then more recently this June. Meanwhile, regardless of how you vote, everything from food to utilities to rentals costs around double here since early 2022, which coincided with a wave of foreign arrivals from Russia and the Ukraine escaping that conflict – including a cashed-up cohort of young IT professionals, culture workers and men avoiding conscription. Somewhere around the edge of that, there’s been disquiet brewing around Chinese and Anglo-Australian investment in mining and other ‘last century’ industries many locals are not reassured will meet adequate environmental standards. This week, there are demonstrations across regional Serbia against Rio Tinto’s proposed lithium mine at Jadar.
To top it all off, today happens to be the anniversary of the start of Operation Storm in 1995, which involved a mass expulsion of around 150,000 – 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina area of Croatia, that was the last major battle of the Croatian war of independence and also a turning point in the outcome of the war in Bosnia. Numbers here around displacements and worse atrocities are always contested, by both and all sides, but I can tell you I know a hell of a lot of people in Belgrade who were part of that terrible exodus of tractors and cars, as children or adults. This part of the former Yugoslavia was the original home of my grandparents (then, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) – he was Serb and she was Croat, from Lika – and I can also tell you their temperaments were not especially zen.
Somehow around and through all of these not-so-historical national tragedies, the global star of Djoković was rising in tennis. Personally – including because I prefer tennis to war – I have been happier to have my Balkan background associated with Djoković than names like Mladić and Milošević. That happened around the time Djoković first seized Wimbledon, and it was a very big shift. Professionally, I was shocked when the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian university where I had worked for some years, summoned me into his executive suite – wondering why I had referenced Djoković in an article commissioned by The Australian newspaper about ethics in sport, at a time when Djoković was riding high as that king of Wimbledon, and far beyond. He then told me to drop my ‘thing for Serbia’ (I was spending time in Belgrade delivering leadership training and cultural projects, some with the Australian Embassy, using my own funding) because it was ‘bad for his brand.’ He’s since been sacked and disgraced for serial sexual harassment of young women across a few universities, so I guess branding wasn’t his expertise.
Scrolling forwards, of course, we come to the bizarre scandal around the 2020 Australian Open when Djoković was invited to participate, flew to Australia to do so, then was detained and expelled because he was a known abstainer from COVID-19 vaccinations. I wrote about part of that saga for The Guardian, which was then picked up globally (without consultation) by Russell Brand. Some of the personalised response to me around that was so foul – and in Australia, sometimes continues to be – I decided to hit pause on Djoković, for a little peace.
But late last year I met a vegan pastry chef in Finland, who’s a big Novak fan. He sent me a photo of the macaroons he made in 2021 especially for Djoković’s US Open grand slam. He hasn’t made more since, to avoid jinxing Djoković. (I just asked him to make some with a golden update, we could call them macrons maybe).
Also last year, a novelist I know from Tasmania wrote me a lovely letter with a poem attached, from his typewriter:
So today I am in Vojvodina, it’s 4 August 2024, and Djoković takes the second set. Alcaraz doesn’t hand it to him, they fight it out like true masters of their art. Piece by piece, point by point. At the end of all that, everyone – even our zen waiter – whoops and applauds. I spot some co-crying at that big family table, especially from the men. The babas now are mainly smiling. The zen waiter grabs the remote control to turn the sound up on Radio Televizija Srbija, so we can hear what Djoković has to say. My Serbian is still quite bad, so I can’t really tell you what that was but my excuse is by now I am co-crying as well.
Back home, BBC Radio tells me, in a jolly English voice also with a nice smile in it, that ‘the most successful tennis player of all time finally wins the one title that had eluded him.’
A golden moment in history, indeed.
Thank you Jane – it was a compelling event, and I am very fortunate to have watched it in such good company. I don't have to watch anything Olympics now as the tennis is done and dusted – maybe the closing ceremony :)
A terrific piece with a great sense of place!