NoVax Novak

Although I have never been good at playing tennis (even in my younger days!), I have been an avid tennis fan from the time I was a teenager.

Sri Lanka in the fifties had no television-- so I would avidly read of the doings of famous players like Australians Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Frank Sedgeman and Lew Hoad, American Pancho Gonzales and Czech-born Egyptian Jaroslav Drobny. In fact, I even recall going to watch Drobny (the only man of Egyptian nationality so far to win Wimbledon) and the famous Filipino Felicisimo Ampon when they visited Ceylon in 1957.

My great interest in tennis had continued over all these years, and I always welcome the beginning of the year when the first of the Grand Slam tournaments, the Australian Open, begins in mid-January. These days with televisions in our living rooms and satellite coverage giving us a ring- side set to the action, I can comfortably watch the great names of tennis matching themselves against the best in the world in Melbourne.

But this past week I have been saddened by the tennis story that has dominated the news-about one of the world’s best tennis players, Novak Djokovic of Serbia, who was invited to participate in the Open by Tennis Australia and was then unceremoniously deported from that country when he was proved not to have conformed to their strict COVID vaccination rules.

Now Australia has had a good record controlling its COVID outbreak. About 90 percent of adults in its 26-million population has received at least two vaccinations and it has one of the lowest death rates and rates of hospitalisation in the world. Even though in British colonial times a whole lot of unsavoury characters and convicts (as Arjuna Ranatunga famously reminded Shane Warne) entered Australia bringing their germs and illnesses into the land, Australia today has stringent rules about allowing foreigners to enter the country--and even stricter rules about allowing unvaccinated foreigners entering.

Djokovic was invited by Tennis Australia (TA), which naturally wanted the big name tennis player included, to participate in the Australian Open-and was given the impression by it that even if he was not vaccinated, he would be granted entry if had a valid exemption certificate. It is now clear from the volumes of leaked documents published last week that TA presented unvaccinated players with a loophole to enter Australia--the loophole being actually catching COVID-19!

If you could prove that you had been infected by Covid six months prior to arriving in Australia, TA advised, you would be granted exemption from the rule requiring you to be vaccinated.

Djokovic, one of the world’s well known anti-vaxxers, seized on this loophole. He was given the impression that if he could produce proof of having caught COVID, Australia would allow him in--and TA would allow him to play in the Open.

Now Djokovic has some unorthodox views about health and diet and immunity--but one cannot just dismiss these as rubbish. After all he himself is a fine example of a healthy and physically fit individual. But he has on several occasions expressed his views against vaccination--and so far has never taken a COVID vaccination. So up to December 10, he was not going to be able to attend the Australian Open--until TA’s loophole presented itself.

We in this country have all heard of ‘Hora Medicals’--and it now appears that Djokovic managed to get himself a ‘Hora Medical’. He provided evidence of a positive test for COVID infection-but as to whether the sample came from him or from a convenient “friend” who had COVID nobody will ever know. It reminds me of that popular lawyer who passed his finals at Law College by getting someone else to sit for a couple of his exam papers--and that well reputed army officer of my time who had diabetes since he was a teenager but passed his pre-entry army medical examination because (since those days they relied on urine tests rather than blood tests to diagnose diabetes) he submitted for testing a sample of urine passed by a friend!

Novak, having got tested around 1 pm on December 16 to prove that he was infected with COVID, did not isolate himself and take treatment for his infection, as Serbian regulations required. Blatantly ignoring the fact that he was infected with COVID, he attended an award ceremony at the Novak Tennis Center in Belgrade on December 17--and the following day gave a oneon-one interview with the French newspaper L’Equipe. This was hardly the behaviour one would expect of a sensible person infected with COVID!

In applying for his visa to enter Australia, he not only lied on his application form about his overseas travel in the fortnight before his flight arrived in Melbourne, he submitted as “proof of COVID infection’ a dubious ‘Positive COVID PCR’ test.

To cut a long story short, Australia was not fooled and did not allow him entry into the country. With that decision went his chance of taking part in the Australian Open and winning another Grand Slam title.

With the next Grand Slam tournament (the French Open) scheduled for May this year, the French Sports Ministry has made it clear that no unvaccinated players will be allowed to take part. So we will have to wait and see what Djokovic will do.

Will he stick to his ‘No-Vax’ philosophy and remain unvaccinated, giving the tournament a miss? Will he finally submit to getting COVIDvaccinated?

Or will he try another ‘Hora Medical’ tactic--not actually getting the jab himself but getting an authentic-looking certificate of double vaccination to present to the French authorities in May?