For Novak Djokovic, winning Olympic gold for Serbia supersedes all else

PARIS – He has won longer matches, but none he had to wait this long to achieve. He’s improbably won more tournaments, but none that seemed this improbable. And he’s collected bigger pieces of metal, but the medal may be the one he loves the most.

Once the gold was finally around his neck Sunday, after 2 hours and 50 minutes of grueling tennis against the current best player on the planet, Novak Djokovic kept kissing it. Once, twice, a third time. Then he let it hang over his chest for a few seconds before picking it up again and smiling.

At age 37, in the midst of a season where he has been in a race against the clock of his tennis mortality, it’s possible that even the most accomplished player in history started to lose a little belief that his Olympic dream would come true. That he could win something not just for his trophy case, but for all of Serbia. That he could complete the last piece of the puzzle before the compounding realities of age and injury made this career-long chase impossible.

“Bringing the gold medal to Serbia, this may be the greatest sports achievement in my life,” Djokovic said on Serbian television moments after a 7-6, 7-6 victory over Carlos Alcaraz that will go down as one of the most impressive of his career.

Because this is no longer the Djokovic who has won 24 Grand Slam titles, who could glide around the court for five hours and contort his joints in ways that didn’t seem humanly possible and then do it again 48 hours later. This is a player who began the year with flagging motivation and poor fitness, a player who rushed back from surgery after tearing his meniscus at the French Open and a player who looked a little helpless just a few weeks ago against the very same opponent in a Wimbledon final. This is a player who hadn’t even won a tournament this year.

And it also, for all intents and purposes, is Alcaraz’s sport now. He’s already won four Grand Slams, including the rare French Open-Wimbledon double. He’s only 21 and already almost complete, whizzing around the court with speed and creativity and competitive fire that evokes the best traits of Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer all in one.

Watching him now is a little bit like what it felt like a quarter-century ago when Tiger Woods would play majors: The numbers aren’t there yet, and the historical conversations are years away, but you know you’re seeing somebody do things you’ve never quite seen before.

When you have those kind of rare athletes in your sport, their path is marked by pivot points. We saw the first a year ago at Wimbledon, when Alcaraz did what many thought was impossible by beating Djokovic in five seats. We saw another on the same court a few weeks ago, when Alcaraz was so thoroughly dominant that it seemed a legitimate question whether Djokovic could beat him again.

And here in Paris, when he wasn’t taking selfies at the athletes’ village and soaking in the pageantry of his first Olympics, Alcaraz was crushing everyone in his wake.

“I knew it was going to be the highest mountain to climb,” Djokovic said.

Djokovic’s prospects of beating Alcaraz in a final never looked particularly promising. Though he had easily handled a clearly diminished Nadal in the second round, perhaps delivering the final loss at Roland Garros to his 15-year rival, the knee was becoming a problem again. In the quarterfinals, Djokovic’s mobility seemed so limited at one point that it was questionable whether he could even finish the match against Stefanos Tsitsipas. Down two breaks in the second set, Djokovic somehow managed to claw back and escape without even having to play a third.

And so he arrived in the final guaranteed the silver – his best ever finish at the Summer Games, and there was some relief in that. But in a sport where the Grand Slams are clearly the pinnacle and there’s no real consensus on how much an Olympic gold really means, Djokovic went completely the other direction.

After four brutal Olympics – a third-set disappointment to Nadal in Beijing, a razor-thin loss to Andy Murray in London, a first-round upset to Juan Martin del Potro in Rio and an inexplicably flat performance in Tokyo against Alexander Zverev – this was Djokovic’s last chance.

He knew it. He said it. He embraced it. He built his entire year around it, and suddenly it was right in front of him.

“I didn’t need too much motivation,” he said. “I knew in the opening two rounds, the way I was playing, that this is my chance. If it’s ever going to be, it’s going to be now.”

And as only the all-time greats can do, he made it happen.

“I heard many, many times that Novak wanted to win the gold medal,” Alcaraz said. “Every Olympic Games he had played, at the end he said it. And I knew that before the match. I had a hungry Novak in front of me.”

It is hard, at this point in Djokovic’s career after so many big matches and Grand Slam finals, to still be wowed at the amount of willpower, concentration and competitive endurance he is capable of summoning. And yet, perhaps because of the player he had in front of him, Djokovic managed to play one of the most impressive matches of his career.

At times, his movement labored. After a few of their more demanding rallies, he hunched over and gasped for oxygen. When he decided to chase something down, the pain and fatigue was written all over his face. And when he had a chance to end a point, he went for it – particularly in the tiebreaks when Djokovic played bolder tennis and Alcaraz was more content to counterpunch well behind the baseline.

Those little moments, those micro decisions, were all that separated them. Djokovic said he had never played a three-hour match packed with so much intensity, where the margins were so thin at every turn. But whereas Djokovic felt unburdened to go for dramatic angles and pick his moments to play high-risk tennis, Alcaraz felt something that was foreign to him in the four Grand Slam finals he has won in the last 24 months.

“In the difficult moments, in the tough situations, I increased my level and pulled out really great tennis,” he said. “Today, probably, I felt more pressure. I don’t know. Maybe other players aren’t feeling the same way about playing for the flag, but I felt the pressure in those situations that I couldn’t play my best tennis.”

Perhaps there has never been more of a validating moment for Olympic tennis itself. No, it’s not a Grand Slam. There will always be top players who skip it for one reason or another, be it surface changes, inconvenient travel between Wimbledon and the US Open or the lack of prize money and ranking points that go to the winner.

But here you had the best ever who put together Djokovic's masterpiece, with a prize he desperately wanted on the line, on the only day remaining in his career that he could possibly do it. And on the other side of the court, you had the current best player in the game, unable to meet the moment in a way that had become routine on the biggest stages in the sport.

Then, a moment after the match ended on an inside-in forehand Djokovic slapped through the court, he dropped his racket and covered his mouth in disbelief. He went across the net to embrace Alcaraz and dropped to his knees, looking at the ground for nearly a minute. And then, he charged into the stands to embrace his family in a more emotional moment than we have seen from Djokovic in years as the winning of Grand Slams became almost routine.

“The intensity of emotions I felt at that moment was something I never felt on the tennis court before,” Djokovic said.

Meanwhile, as the Spanish television cameras swarmed him, Alcaraz sobbed in a way he’s never shown publicly after losses − not that there have been too many of them. But to this point in Alcaraz’s career, every setback has been a lesson, even a blessing to help him maintain humility and sharpen his focus on his inevitable path to the top.

Alcaraz, like Djokovic, is eventually going to win every big prize this sport has to offer. But the realization that he has to wait four more years for this one hit differently for a young man in a big hurry.

“I thought that I let all the Spanish people down a little bit in some way,” Alcaraz said. “I know that the Spanish people were waiting for my gold medal and myself, I worked for it, I went for it and it could have happened. That’s why I got emotional at the end. I couldn’t make the Spanish people proud. But right now, thinking, more relaxed, I think I made them proud and made them believe in a certain way, and I’m proud about the way I represented my flag.”

Even for superstars who have all the money, all the trophies, all the adulation they’ll ever want around the world, there’s something unique about that little piece of gold. Alcaraz will have more years to chase it. Djokovic just had one shot. And as the Serbian flag went up over Roland Garros, it meant everything.

“It supersedes everything that I've ever felt on the tennis court after winning big trophies,” Djokovic said. “When I take everything in consideration, this is probably the biggest sporting success I’ve ever had in my career.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Novak Djokovic puts his heart into winning gold vs Alcaraz