Novak Djokovic’s tennis record made his ranking irrelevant, but he needs to care about it now

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Novak Djokovic was as unequivocal as an athlete could be earlier this month, when he was asked what his goals were for the ongoing clay-court season.

“Roland Garros,” he answered, referring to the French Open, in late May and early June, after losing his opening match in Monte Carlo, Monaco, to Alejandro Tabilo. “That’s it.”

Understood. So what’s a player like that doing at a tournament like the Madrid Open?

Sure, Madrid, which got underway this week, takes place on the red clay, just as the French Open does, but the similarities largely end there.

The Spanish capital sits more than 2,000 feet above sea level, which allows the ball to fly and bounce during tennis matches in ways it won’t in Paris. The air is also dry, allowing the sun to bake the surface and make it behave more like a hard court than a clay one — if it gets hot enough during the day. Then at night, it can get quite cold.

Add that all up and few players would argue that Madrid provides much in the way of preparation for doing battle in the French capital a month later. There’s a reason Rafael Nadal, the greatest male clay-court player, won Madrid “just” five times — and one of those came when it was a hard-court event. Four titles still sounds pretty good, but for these clay-court swing facts: Nadal won the French Open 14 times, the Barcelona Open 12 times, the Monte Carlo Masters 11 times and the Italian Open 10 times.

Nadal, and others, have long said the latter event in Rome, which traditionally follows Madrid on the calendar, serves as the closest facsimile for what awaits at Roland Garros. But here is Djokovic, a three-time Madrid champion, taking to the courts there for the first time in three years and for only the second since 2019, when he last won the event.

His presence is part of the peculiar riddle that Djokovic, who turns 38 on May 22, has been trying to solve for going on two years now. What is the best way to try to win a 25th Grand Slam title at an age when players don’t win Grand Slam titles anymore?

The answer mostly lies in finding the right balance between rest and match fitness, but at this moment, Djokovic is returning to a tournament he hasn’t played since 2022 because he has to pay attention to something that he swore more than a year ago would never concern him again: the ATP rankings.

After securing the year-end No. 1 for a record eighth time in 2023, points and places ceased to matter to the greatest player of the modern era. Now they matter once more, because they hold one of the keys to his only clay-court season goal.

Entering Madrid, Djokovic was the world No. 5, with 4,130 points, within shouting distance of Taylor Fritz at No. 4, who had 4,725. A deficit of 595 points might sound like a lot, but it’s really not. The Madrid Open is an ATP Masters 1,000 event, so named for the number of ranking points it awards to its eventual champion.

With Djokovic not having played Madrid last year, he’s not playing against his own achievements. He has no ranking points to defend, which makes the next 10 days the closest thing to a free hit tennis has to offer. Every match he wins adds to his points total. He will have earned 10 points as soon as he hits a ball in his first match Saturday, since he was given a bye in the opening round and gets the money and the points for having won at that initial stage.

Fritz is in the opposite position. He made the semifinals in Madrid a year ago, which means he’s defending 390 points. That makes Djokovic’s deficit more like 205 because the American will only improve his tally if he gets to the final, and if he is eliminated before the semifinals, he will lose points.

That looks more likely than not, largely because Fritz has been carrying an abdominal strain since the Australian Open in January.

In Miami last month, where he lost in the semifinals to Jakub Menšík, he said he couldn’t try to block back his opponent’s powerful serve because he thought it would put too much of a strain on his sore muscle. He then skipped Monte Carlo to recuperate and optimize his chances of defending his Madrid points.

Having beaten Christopher O’Connell 6-1, 6-4 in his first match Friday (the second round), he will play Benjamin Bonzi in the third Sunday. Fritz has made a clay-court final before, but the red dirt is his worst surface.

Still, why should the greatest player of the modern era care whether he is ranked fourth or fifth in the world today, or whether he is ahead or behind a player he is a perfect 10 for 10 against in their head-to-head meetings?

This is where Roland Garros comes in.

Djokovic could end up there regardless of his seeding in that scenario. But at No. 4, he has the guarantee of playing a minimum five matches before he faces one of his sternest tests, which at least offers a window of opportunity to try to tap back into his once-peerless ability to play himself into peak form at a major.

At this year’s Australian Open, Djokovic faced Alcaraz in the last eight. The stress of that test and the pressure the Spaniard puts on opponents likely contributed to Djokovic tearing a muscle in the back of his leg in the first set. While he prevailed in four sets, having managed to scramble his opponent’s brain when all Alcaraz needed to do was keep doing what he had been doing, Djokovic had to retire from his semifinal against Zverev three days later after losing an attritional first set in a tiebreak.

Playing Alcaraz and Sinner takes more out of Djokovic — and just about anybody else — than playing anyone else does. In his case, it’s best to face them as late as possible in a tournament, if he has to at all.

There are also the non-mathematical considerations.

Djokovic is living through a common misconception about what happens to elite athletes declining from their peaks.

Those apexes stay sharp and accessible in fleeting moments, even when they need them most: he found his on his otherworldly run to the gold medal at last year’s Olympics in Paris. It’s the stability that erodes, the repetitions that are necessary to maintain their excellence.

Djokovic’s clay season didn’t go well last year. He was serviceable in Monte Carlo, where he reached the semifinals, but he has never been dominant at that event. Then he took the next three weeks off, with the idea of minimizing the mileage in his legs during a year when his top goal was winning Olympic gold.

He assumed he could get enough French Open preparation under his belt in Rome, where he had made the final in four of the previous five years. He won his opening match (in the second round) at a canter, but while signing autographs, a metal water bottle accidentally fell from a spectator’s rucksack and struck him hard on the head. Djokovic played his third-round match, but looked understandably off-kilter and lost to Tabilo.

Then he scrambled to gain entry into the Geneva Open, a move that betrayed something like panic, since he never plays a tournament the week before a Grand Slam. He was flat there, too, struggling at times to stay upright and gasping to catch his breath, especially during an ugly semifinal defeat to Tomáš Macháč.

Then came the French Open, where he played himself in just like the Djokovic of old before getting past Lorenzo Musetti in a five-set third-round epic that finished after three in the morning local time. That understandably took something out of him, and he tore the medial meniscus in his right knee during his next match, an improbable win over Francisco Cerundolo. Instead of playing his quarterfinal against Casper Ruud, he withdrew and had surgery. Returning weeks later, he made the final at Wimbledon before winning that Olympic gold medal he craved above all else.

Still, he did not win another title and the season overall was a staccato, up-and-down affair, as his schedule has been for a few years while still delivering elite results. Not so much in 2025. Djokovic played the Brisbane International before the Australian Open and played in both Indian Wells, Calif. and Miami — the Sunshine Double — for the first time since 2018.

Although he only really cares about winning at least one more Grand Slam and beating Margaret Court’s 24-title record, which he currently shares, Djokovic appears to have decided that being a part-time tennis player doesn’t work either for his body or his brain. Playing more often may take a toll on his ageing frame, but he has to do it to try to become sharp on the clay and get his legs ready for the test of five-set tennis that awaits him at the French Open.

More matches might mean there will be more nights he plays like a shadow of his best self, as he did in Monte Carlo against Tabilo.

“It was horrible,” he said of that straight-sets defeat two weeks ago. “I did not have high expectations, really. I knew I’m going to have a tough opponent and I knew I’m going to probably play pretty bad. But this bad, I didn’t expect.”

These days, that is the price he has to pay for proper preparation.

But if it ends up helping him land in the top four at the French Open, it will probably have been worth it.

(Top photo: Thomas Coex / AFP via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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