LONDON – Novak Djokovic met another 38-year-old in the Wimbledon locker room after a straight-forward victory at the Central Stadium.
Born eight months before Djokovic, Gael Monfils is the only player with a draw for the man, and he is waiting for the start of a second round.
“He kind of smiled at me and said, ‘Good days in the office’,” Djokovic said. “At this age, he said, we need those types of days.”
Thursday was a great day for Wimbledon’s old defender.
There will be six people over 33 in the third round when the new generation led by 22-year-old Carlos Alcaraz and 23-year-old Jannik Sinner start taking over. (Monfils’ match against Marton Fucsovics, 33, was suspended due to the darkness on Thursday and will be completed on Friday).
Djokovic beat Dan Evans, 35, and Gregor Dimitrov, 34, to remove Corentin Moutet on Thursday; Jan-Lennard Struff, 35, beat Felix Auger-Aliassime in a game suspended Wednesday. Marin Cilic, 36, beats the fourth seed of Britain, Jack Draper, who is 23. Adrian Mannarino, 37, advanced Wednesday.
And, as Struff points out, those turn-by-turn performances were taken after the first round defending champion Alcaraz after another 38-year-old Fabio Fognini pushed two defending champion Alcaraz to five games in the first round.
“It’s amazing,” said Straff, who faced Alkaraz in the central court on Friday. “You’ll see a lot of older players playing well in tennis. It’s also inspiring me to keep going.”
Cilic, the 2014 U.S. Open champion and two major runner-ups elsewhere, will return to top tennis after two knee surgeries before taking part in this year’s Low-Level Challenger Tour event to improve his ranking. He had to pass the qualifying round to get into the French Open brackets, and he lost in the first round.
He has been making his first appearance at Wimbledon since 2021 and is happy to see some players of his own age still exist.
“It’s great to see them continue to play in the game and use this experience to do well in the Grand Slam,” Cilic said.
It seems that older people often stay behind the scenes.
“All of us, we have great respect for each other,” Dimitrov said. “We do these things, and when we have lunch, we rarely get together even in the locker room. The most interesting thing is that we spend a lot of time preparing.
Dimitrov said being one of the veterans on the tour also made it easier to appreciate life as a tennis player. But he admitted that there were other things better when he was young.
“I want to have something… is it a little easier to physically? Yes,” he said. “But at this point, being able to compete with the boys and still win the game brings difficulties to the best player – that’s one of the reasons to continue playing.”
