There they go again.
For the second time in three weeks, Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz will do battle for one of the biggest prizes in tennis when they meet in the gold medal match at Roland Garros on Sunday, the latest chapter in their inter-generational duel pitting the man atop the all-time tennis heap against the young buck ruling the current one.
Logic holds that there isn’t much time left for these sorts of battles, especially not at the Olympics. Djokovic is 37. As ageless as he can seem, it’s hard to see a duel with Alcaraz happening in four years in Los Angeles with a gold medal on the line, though don’t put it past him.
Alcaraz, 21, and already setting the standard, especially this spring and summer, seemingly has a decade or more of supremacy ahead of him.
On Sunday they will do something that is becoming increasingly rare, even in the short time they have been facing each other at the top of the sport. They will play for a prize that neither of them has, and it isn’t a title at some random tour stop in Basel where both of them happen to be.
For Djokovic, the gold medal is the rare tennis bauble that he somehow doesn’t have on a mantle crowded with 24 Grand Slam titles, not in doubles or mixed doubles. A lonely bronze in singles from 2008 is all he has to show for his four previous appearances in the Olympic tournament.
He’s played professional tennis for 20 years. He’s played in 49 Grand Slam semifinals and won 37 of them. Until Friday evening against Lorenzo Musetti of Italy, he’d never won one at the Olympics. When he did, with a last, blasted forehand down the line, he collapsed on his back in the red clay.
He clutched his fists and fought to hold back his tears but lost that one, as the Serbian flags were waved and the crowd chanted: “NOVAK, NOVAK!”
There is no way to overstate how much this tournament means to him, especially given that it looked like a pipe dream two months ago when he tore his meniscus on this same court and had to undergo an operation and a high-speed rehabilitation that both risked and saved his summer.
For Alcaraz, it’s the next piece of hardware accumulation that will allow him to, as he put it last month at Wimbledon, “sit at that table” with Djokovic and the rest of the all-time greats. He has a chance to become one of three players to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the Olympic tournament in the same year. Rafael Nadal and Steffi Graf are the others.
“Two legends from sport,” Alcaraz said. “I will try not to think of every stat, the things I could achieve.”
On Friday he played as though he already has a place setting at that table, or maybe even owned it, blowing through Felix Auger Aliasime 6-1, 6-1 with a frightening ferocity that he has recently acquired, especially in the latter stages of tournaments.
In bright sunshine and swelteringly humid air at Roland Garros on Friday, both sets followed a pattern to a tee, as if Alcaraz had scripted them. Lose a game while returning; win a game on serve. In the second set, the other way round. Then, spend five games pulling Auger-Aliassime all about the court, discombobulating his game plan until he’s throwing in new ideas like he has to do, but not having any of them work, getting more and more confused until he looks across the net and it’s 1-5 and it’s over.
He basically did this same thing to Auger-Aliassime, a deceptively excellent clay court player, on this same court in the fourth round of the french Open in June. Auger-Aliassime is just 23, only a few years removed from being considered destined for big titles. Now he is looking at years of afternoons like Friday coming at him. No fun.
“I knew I had to start the match well, really focusing on every point, trying to play with a lot of intensity,” Alcaraz said. “I didn’t think it was going to be like that.”
Djokovic played a different kind of all-time great tennis. He survived an increasingly dangerous opponent one night after a few bad steps had him wondering if he’d done his knee again during his quarterfinal win over Stefanos Tsitsipas. “Very worried,” he had said, after suffering sharp pain that only subsided with the help of painkillers during that match.
He had the knee examined Friday but appeared to moving without hindrance for most of the night. On Thursday, he said he was going to “ pray to God for everything to be OK.” Those prayers were seemingly answered.
Djokovic and Musetti, who played in the semifinals at Wimbledon last month, played full-gas, big-boy tennis for most of two hours. Djokovic’s chest heaved after points. He had to take extra time to catch his breath and got a warning and a penalty for it, and then a code violation warning after an exchange with the chair umpire.
This was what stressed out Djokovic looks like, Djokovic who wants something desperately, something rare and unfamiliar, and wants it badly enough that his nerves begin to sap his energy. He yelled at his Serbian coaches and teammates, repeatedly to make more noise and give him the boost he needed.
Musetti matched him shot for shot until the final points of the first set, he hit an easy putaway right back and Djokovic, who paddled it back and somehow won the point. A sloppy drop shot from Musetti gave Djokovic the lead he so rarely relinquishes, and didn’t Friday, despite losing his serve twice in the second set.
He knows what it coming next, a test against the best of, as he half-sneeringly puts it, “the next, next, next, generation”, his shorthand for noting how many have come before only to have him swat them away. He knows Alacaraz (as well as the injured Italian Jannik Sinner) are different, playing at a level he has not been able to reach all year.
He knows he’s going to need to get there, somehow, and to convince himself that it’s possible, just as he once convinced himself he could overtake Nadal and Roger Federer. It’s the only way to get just about the only thing he does not have.
Additional reporting by James Hansen
(Daniela Porcelli/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)
