Tennis: Shutting Novak Djokovic out of the US Open is a preposterous injustice

The exclusion of Novak Djokovic from the US Open field is hard to justify for Oliver Brown. Photo / Photosport

OPINION:

When Novak Djokovic first suggested he was prepared to forgo major tournaments "because the principles of decision-making on my body are more important than any title", BBC interviewer Amol Rajan regarded the notion as almost comically self-defeating, demanding: "Why, Novak, why?". If you seek genuine absurdity, though, look less at the Serb's personal medical decision than at the circumstances of his exile from this month's US Open.

Since June, when the Biden administration removed a 17-month-long order for foreign nationals to test before travelling to the country, Djokovic has waited for common sense to prevail.

After all, since the US Centres for Disease Control have now explicitly removed any distinctions between how vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens are treated, surely the same liberties should be extended to visitors? Sadly, the wheels of Covid bureaucracy grind painfully slowly. And it is Djokovic, who dared hope he would be granted a tilt at a record-equalling 22nd major title, who has suffered one of the most preposterous injustices in sporting history.

His exclusion from Flushing Meadows is nonsensical on every level. At last year's tournament, where every single attendee was required to show proof of vaccination, Djokovic was allowed to play. This year, at a time when most show-me-your-papers strictures have been rolled back, he is barred. The situation is an affront to all logic.

Look at it another way. The removal of the testing requirement to board a flight to the US creates, when combined with a continued ban on all unvaccinated aliens, a ludicrous two-tier system.

If vaccinated, you can technically travel even if riddled with all the worst Covid symptoms. But Djokovic, having not received the jab, is required to test negative before almost every journey he undertakes. And still Biden's America persists with the blunt instrument of a blanket ban.

US Open officials will shrug that in shutting out Djokovic, they are simply following CDC guidance. How wearisome this buck-passing has become, when the rules have long ceased to be grounded in rationality.

It was grating enough when Australia deported him in January, on the spurious pretext that his presence might inflame anti-vaxxers in one of the most highly-vaccinated countries on Earth. But removing him from a second slam in seven months truly is beyond the pale.

Novak Djokovic was able to take part in and win Wimbledon earlier in 2022. Photo / Photosport

It is not merely Djokovic's disciples up in arms at the ludicrousness of it all.

Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, argued: "Every one of these policies that discriminate against the unvaccinated needs to be changed immediately. Djokovic should play in the US Open."

The sentiment was echoed by Dr Nicole Saphier, a radiologist at Monmouth, who said: "These vaccine mandates are all culture-driven, not data-driven."

This is a key point, for so much of the hostility towards Djokovic is rooted less in hard evidence than in cultural disapproval.

Whenever his name is mentioned, tennis instinctively retreats into its cosy consensus that his refusal to be jabbed automatically makes him a selfish crank, who deserves all the punishments heaped upon him.

Where Djokovic is portrayed as the devil incarnate, Rafael Nadal, who now has a chance to seize a second major by virtue of his rival's pariah status, is acclaimed as a paragon of virtue.

Little of this sanctimony stacks up in a legal sense, of course. Just as the Australian Lawyers' Alliance condemned his removal from the country as an "Orwellian" example of thought-policing, Djokovic's exclusion from the US serves no practical purpose except to make the puritans of the pandemic feel better about themselves. The decision is not merely a pity. It is, frankly, an outrage.