Novak Djokovic has, over the course of his professional tennis career, won the first-round match at a Grand Slam seventy-eight consecutive times. Seventy-eight. That is the kind of number that stops being a statistic and starts being a personality trait. It is not something a person accomplishes; it is something a person is. Novak Djokovic wins first-round matches at Grand Slams the way the sun rises in the east and the way a Wednesday follows a Tuesday.

Or he did, until Sunday at the US Open, when he ran into a 25-year-old Argentine ranked 49th in the world named Mariano Navone and, four hours and thirty-six minutes later, walked off Arthur Ashe Stadium having lost 6-7(5), 7-5, 6-4, 2-6, 1-6.

The last time this happened to Novak Djokovic — the last time he lost a Grand Slam opener — was the 2006 Australian Open. Facebook was two years old. YouTube was seven months old. The iPhone did not exist. Mariano Navone was five years old.

The Match

Djokovic looked, from the opening game, like a man who had been sent to play tennis against his doctor’s advice. He was pale. He was moving a step slow. He was — and multiple broadcasters used this exact word — visibly ill. He gutted out the first set in a tiebreak, dropped the second, dropped the third, and then, in the fourth and fifth sets, appeared to physically deflate. Navone won those sets 6-2 and 6-1. Djokovic managed three total games across the final two sets. In the fifth set alone, he won one game.

None of this is how Novak Djokovic loses tennis matches. Novak Djokovic loses tennis matches by getting narrowly outplayed in a four-hour five-setter after producing the greatest ball he has ever hit at a moment of exquisite pressure. He does not lose tennis matches by shuffling around Arthur Ashe looking like a man trying to remember where he parked. It is the tennis-loss equivalent of watching a lion get taken down by a mildly determined labrador.

The stadium, to its credit, sensed what it was witnessing. There was applause in the fourth set. There was more applause in the fifth. By the end, there was the particular hush of 22,000 people collectively realizing they had a story to tell for the rest of their lives.

Mariano Navone, Briefly

Mariano Navone is 25 years old, from Nueve de Julio in Buenos Aires province — a town named after a date, which is a fun fact you may now use at a party. He is a clay-courter by temperament and results; his career-high ranking of No. 29 came in June 2024 on the back of a South American clay swing. He is, as of the ATP rankings published the day after he beat Djokovic, the forty-ninth-best tennis player currently drawing breath.

None of this stopped him from playing the best five sets of his life against the second-most-decorated men’s Grand Slam champion in history. He served well. He returned better. He hit his forehand with the particular clarity of a man who understood, correctly, that he was going to be asked about this match in every press conference he gives for the rest of his career and wanted to have something to say.

Afterward, at the net, Djokovic embraced him and said something we cannot lip-read. In his own press conference, Djokovic was gracious. He acknowledged not feeling well. He acknowledged Navone had played very well. He did not, when asked about retirement, say the word “no.” He did not, when asked about retirement, say the word “yes.” He said the word “vague,” which is the word he keeps saying now, and which is doing an unbelievable amount of work.

The Streak

Seventy-eight first-round wins in a row is not just a Djokovic record. It is, mathematically, one of the most astonishing consistency streaks in the history of professional sports. Roger Federer, at his best, was never near that. Rafael Nadal, at his best, was never near that. It requires a player to (a) show up healthy at approximately sixteen consecutive Slams a year for two decades and (b) simply never have one of those days where the racquet feels like a snow shovel.

Djokovic has now had one of those days. At the US Open. Against a clay-court specialist. In August of 2026.

The tennis calendar being what it is, Djokovic will now go somewhere, rest, presumably see a doctor, and come back in a month or two to play more tennis. He is 39 years old. He has, this year, lost to a 19-year-old at Roland Garros after leading two sets to love, and now lost in the first round of the US Open to a career clay-court player ranked 49th. These are, in isolation, both explainable events. In sequence, they begin to look like something else.

The word for what they begin to look like is, of course, the word Djokovic will not say.

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