Novak Djokovic's 2024 has been far from successful, and he is the first one to admit that, but Andy Roddick recently put it into perspective.
As someone who has won 99 ATP Tour-level titles, including 24 Grand Slams, Djokovic's goals are always the highest. He openly spoke about focusing only on winning Grand Slams at this stage of his tennis career and not winning a single one in 2024 could certainly be seen as a failure.
However, even though he stated winning majors as his primary goal almost every season, that was different for the 2024 season. Djokovic wanted to win the Olympic gold medal at the Paris Olympics, and he did that.
He achieved the only goal he had for the season, and on top of that, he played in the Wimbledon Championships final, in the Australian Open semi-final, and he also reached the Shanghai Masters final.
Of course, unless he wins another tournament this year, the 2024 season will mark his least successful season when it comes to titles won, but again, that needs to be put into perspective, and Andy Roddick did that during the most recent episode of his Served with Andy Roddick podcast.
"One thing I want to talk about is, on the men’s side no surprise, [Jannik] Sinner–Novak [Djokovic] final, like Novak coming back and going through a Masters 1000 draw at 37, he hasn’t played since the Open, I guess he played Davis Cup but haven’t played an ATP match since the Open."
Roddick admitted that he listened to the 37-year-old's press conference, and he noticed when Djokovic openly admitted that the 2024 season has been probably the worst of his professional tennis career.
"I was struck by his press conference afterwards when someone asked about the negative results, I thought his take was completely rational. In a world where we kind of train ourselves and especially the great ones almost train yourself to be a master of being irrational sometimes."
"He goes, ‘Yeah like listen, this is my worst performing year for a long time. It was bound to happen at some point. I’m still happy with my gold medal, oh by the way.'"
However, Roddick reminded of all of Djokovic's 2024 achievements. Despite playing an extremely restricted schedule and missing many tournaments, including ATP Masters 1000 events, the Serbian is the sixth highest-ranked player in the 2024 ATP Race.
By points, his season has been better than that of Casper Ruud, Andrey Rublev, Alex de Minaur, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and many, many more. That's why Roddick tried to highlight that Djokovic's bad season is bad only when compared to his previous results because compared to the rest of the players, he's still better than the vast majority of the Tour.
"But let’s think about this just for a second and put it in terms of like normies, like his worst performing year ever – he made the semifinals of Australia, the finals of Wimbledon, won Olympic gold, finals of Masters 1000. Like that’s a career year for most of us. But I thought it was completely rational."