Novak Djokovic, Serbian tennis star, entitled boy wonder, believer in the clarifying powers of celery juice and renowned vaccine sceptic, has added a new moniker to that list – unlikely prisoner of conscience.
The world's number one tennis player flew to Melbourne last week to compete in the Australian Open. As the Irish mammy of any Coogee-dwelling builder could have told him, you don't get into the country these days without either a vaccine cert or a medical exemption. He announced on Instagram before leaving for Melbourne that he had indeed secured the exemption permission.
However, since he is not known to be suffering from anything more imminently life-threatening than a bad dose of science denial, it wasn’t entirely clear how he qualified.
If you had Covid within the past six months but are also a noted vaccine sceptic, do you still get away with it? While he was in the air, a heated version of this discussion seems to have broken out between the Labor-led state government in Victoria and the Liberal-led federal government.
I feel sorry for him but he knew the conditions months ago
By the time he landed, the Australian Border Force had made up its mind. It interrogated him for eight hours before landing him unceremoniously in a mid-range 4.5 star hotel to await Monday’s appeal against his deportation.
The affair prompted an outpouring of outrage over what Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic called the "harassment" and "political persecution" of "our Novak". "They are stomping all over Novak to stomp all over Serbia and the Serbian people," declared his father, Srdjan.
He said his son was “the Spartacus of the new world” and also, somewhat confusingly, “like water”. Whatever happens, his ranking as the world’s number one Tennis Dad is safe.
It was hard to know which was more ludicrous: the outbreak of melodramatic hyperbole on both sides, including the sight of supporters lining up outside his hotel with “Free Novak” and “Indefinite Detention = Torture” signs, or the tennis player’s blithe assumption that he’d just rock on up unvaccinated at the immigration desk and charm his way in.
“I feel sorry for him but he knew the conditions months ago,” Rafa Nadal said. To Nadal, Djokovic must feel like your mate who keeps refusing to bring his ID to the pub because he insists the barmen know him, and then expects you to buy him pints all night when he can’t get served.
Global attention
The apparently disproportionate global attention given to the story – which is, when you boil it down, about a man who is exceptionally good at hitting balls over nets getting involved in a visa row and having to spend the weekend alone in a hotel room except for, bless him, “insects” – is a measure of the fatigue many of us are feeling at this stage in the pandemic.
Two years on, we all know a “Novax”, as the artist formerly known as Djoker has been renamed. You may not be able to tell at a glance whether they’re vaccinated (although, like the old joke about vegans goes, you won’t have to, they’ll tell you again and again and again.) But you can immediately spot their fantasies of exceptionalism.
They include the woman who walks around the supermarket with her mask under her chin bellowing at her children. The folk convinced the restrictions on gatherings don’t apply to their little gathering. There was a Novax at the next table in the restaurant I visited in the lull days before New Year’s Eve.
Sending Djokovic to the quarantine centre in Melbourne was the modern equivalent of parading him through the streets so that people could egg and boo him
She loudly counted on her fingers all the people she’d been staying with over Christmas who had tested positive. “Are you not a close contact?” a friend asked, alarmed.
“No,” she said, lashing back more Sauvignon. “I don’t think so. Well, I don’t actually know. It’s all very confusing.”
It’s really not, I wanted to lean across and say. Just stay home. The Novaxes are increasingly hard to take.
Nonetheless, Djokovic's supporters are right about one thing. Refusing him entry to Australia is not a public health measure – the risk he poses to anyone other than himself is minimal. It's not even about imposing the rules fairly, since he did actually get an exemption to compete. It is a political stunt.
Scapegoat
By now, we are all familiar with the phenomenon of authorities finding some group or individual to blame for the crisis in order to distract from their own failings. In Australia’s case, those failures include record case numbers, an overloaded PCR system and a shortage of wildly overpriced antigen tests (a single test costs up to AU$30/€19 there, if you’re lucky enough to find one).
With a federal election looming, the government was looking for a scapegoat. Right on cue, up he rocked – the world’s top seeded scapegoat.
I’ve made the argument before that crudely stereotyping the unvaccinated is not helpful to any of us. There are all sorts of reasons why a proportion of people are still holding out, and they rarely involve, say, “being a selfish sociopath”. They might have been pregnant during the rollout, and deterred by the mixed messages.
They might have been sucked into a web of fear and fake news, not because they are bad people, but because they are vulnerable people. But there are a few in every country who have little excuse, other than the fact that they are, say, a truculent man-child who fancies himself as a Spartacus for the Goop generation.
Sending Djokovic to the quarantine centre in Melbourne was the modern equivalent of parading him through the streets so that people could egg and boo him. It was a political distraction. It was, some reporters claimed, a show trial, which seemed to be stretching the definition a bit. Let’s face it, the biggest show here is the one Djokovic is making of himself.