History will be made at the 2022 Wimbledon Championships, where both the top two players in the ATP rankings will be missing from the tournament.
The third Grand Slam of the season will commence on June 27th, and 128 men will vie to win the most prestigious golden trophy at the All England Club. But two of those who will be missing will be the soon-to-be World No. 1 Daniil Medvedev and World No. 2 Alexander Zverev.
The new ATP rankings, which will be updated in a few days, will see Novak Djokovic rise to third after he surrendered his French Open title in the quarterfinal stage to eventual winner Rafael Nadal.
When Wimbledon begins, Djokovic will be ranked World No. 3 but will be the top seed. Daniil Medvedev can't play because of the ab imposed on Russian players following their country's invasion of Ukraine.
Thanks to his fantastic run at Roland Garros and Djokovic's ranking slide, Alexander Zverev will be ranked number 3 in a couple of days. He'll also be number two when Wimbledon starts.
Sadly, the German will miss the grass-court major due to an ankle injury sustained at Roland Garros. Zverev won't recover to play until the North American hard-court swing begins, and it's not a guarantee he'll even play then.
That means, for the first time since ATP rankings came into effect in 1973, the 2022 Wimbledon Championships will be remembered as the tournament where neither the world's top two men played.
One other instance where a Grand Slam men's tournament did not contain any of the top two was the 1999 Australian Open. So history has been revisited and also created simultaneously.
Moreover, Djokovic will lose all his points from Wimbledon (2000) because the ATP has removed points from the tournament to counter the All England Club's ban on Russian and Belarusian players.