PARIS — Novak Djokovic smiled right along with everyone else when his first-round Paris Olympics opponent was so excited just to claim one game Saturday that he celebrated by pulling the bottom of his shirt over his head, baring his chest.
After completing his 6-0, 6-1 victory in less than an hour, Djokovic was a little less amused, saying he doesn’t think someone like Matthew Ebden - a 36-year-old doubles player from Australia who hadn’t competed in a tour-level, main-draw singles match since June 2022 - should have been on the court without a teammate at the Summer Games.
“I really don’t understand the rules. They’re really not logical for me,” said Djokovic, a 24-time Grand Slam champion who is seeking his first Olympic gold medal.
“I don’t think it’s a good image for the sport, to be honest,” he said about having a doubles player enter singles at the Olympics. “There were a lot of singles players that have plenty of time, that were alternates, that could have been called to come. This part I don’t get.”
Carlos Alcaraz, a four-time major champion, found the situation odd, too.
“It’s a difficult rule, I guess. Honestly there are a lot of players who deserve to be here and playing here in the Olympic Games,” Alcaraz said after his first-round win Saturday. “I think it should be different, because the next singles player (in the rankings) deserves to be here if someone withdraws from the tournament.”
Ebden hasn’t even had a singles ranking since he was No. 970 the week of May 29, 2023.
But he already was in Paris to compete in men’s doubles - where he’s been as high as No. 1 and currently is No. 3 and has won two major championships - and so that made him available for the singles competition when 16th-ranked Holger Rune of Denmark pulled out because of a wrist injury.
Ebden was not the first doubles player asked to fill in, but he was the first to say yes. He hadn’t even practiced singles in about two years until playing a tiebreaker in training on Friday.
“From the word go, I just had to make a joke of it,” he said about taking on Djokovic, who has spent more weeks ranked No. 1 than anyone in tennis history. “I wasn’t coming here to play singles, put it that way.”
International Tennis Federation spokeswoman Heather Bowler said the group devises the Olympic rules for the sport in conjunction with the International Olympic Committee. The cutoff for having an athlete on an Olympic roster for tennis is a week before the opening ceremony, which was Friday.
“We’d love to have last-minute replacements, but in the grand scheme of things, with 10,500 athletes and 206 National Olympic Committees (at the Games), it’s logistically extremely difficult and there has to be a cutoff point for off-site replacement at some point,” Bowler told The Associated Press. “Any change would need to be discussed with the Tours” that run women’s and men’s professional tennis.
Ebden said his wife pointed out that he’d never officially retired as a singles player, so he told Djokovic afterward this match would, indeed, mark the end of his singles career.
After having gone up against Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray over the years, Ebden was thrilled to share a court with Djokovic. And excited to play at Court Philippe Chatrier, the main stadium at Roland Garros, which hosts the clay-court French Open each year and is being used for the Paris Games.
“Some miracle happened and I got to play Novak on Chatrier. … The only goal out there was just to not get injured, honestly,” Ebden said. “Literally, that was the only goal. Obviously I was never going to win. But it was nice to hit a few balls out there.”
In addition to his lone game, a love hold while already trailing 6-0, 4-0, Ebden definitely did what he could to entertain the fans.
He jokingly offered his racket to a spectator, as if to say, “Here - you give it a shot!” He tried an underhand serve.
“Not going to win the point any other way, just about,” said Ebden, whose wife and child were in the stands. “And I was thinking to say to my son one day: ‘I did an underarm serve against Novak in my last-ever singles match.’ There’s some story to tell.”
As for Djokovic, the win was his 14th at an Olympics, the most for a man since tennis returned to the Summer Games in 1988.
Next could be a real rise in the quality of his foe: Rafael Nadal, who collected a record 14 of his 22 Grand Slam titles at Roland Garros. Nadal plays his first-round match Sunday; win that, and he and Djokovic will meet in the second round.
“Let’s see how he plays tomorrow - if he plays - and if we get to face each other,” Djokovic said about his longtime rival, “I think it’s going to be, for sure, a spectacle.”
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