“I did everything I possibly can to basically manage the muscle tear that I had,” said Djokovic, who didn’t “hit a ball” until an hour before the match.
“Medications and the strap, and the physio work helped to some extent today. But towards the end of that first set I just started feeling more and more pain. It was, yeah, too much, I guess, to handle for me at the moment.”
Every great athlete has a period of decline, and we can probably look at this retirement as another milestone in Djokovic’s slow slide down the tennis mountain. No longer could his body withstand an injury and still make it through the stresses of major-tournament tennis. The fact that he could do that in the first place is remarkable, and a sign of how fit he was, and how much better he was on the courts in Melbourne than anyone else, even into his 30s.
Failing to win a Slam when he was injured hardly means that Djokovic’s career is over. It just means he’s a little more like everyone else now, a little more mortal than he was two days ago.
