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Novak Djokovic is old. He’s old in tennis years because he’s closer to 40 than to 30. Generally speaking, those are the years when tennis players start to decline, no matter what the career of Tommy Haas would make you believe.
The closer you get to 40, the closer you are to retiring—provided that you made it this far. That’s true for Djokovic as much as for any other tennis player. The next Grand Slam event is the French Open. That is an event played on clay, which is the most physical of the tennis surfaces.
Playing on clay is slow, the points drag out, the matches are long, and it’s generally not the surface where an aging tennis player wants to find himself.
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What does that mean for Novak Djokovic’s chances of winning this event? Nothing good. The last time he won the event was in 2023 when he bested Casper Ruud. It’s been a while since then, and he hasn’t come close to doing the same thing. The closest he came was last year at the Olympics, which were played on these courts. The caveat there was that the event was best-of-three and not best-of-five.
That makes a huge difference because Djokovic was able to arrive in the final much fresher compared to what happened at Roland Garros earlier that year. He was playing decently well, but he was struggling to keep that level high throughout the match. It’s no wonder that he ended up struggling in quite a few of those matches, and that struggling eventually took a toll on him because he ended up injuring himself in one of those matches, which eventually forced him to withdraw from the event. That was simply the reality of it, and it’s hugely due to his age.
Let’s not kid ourselves—because on clay, where physicality matters quite a bit, a slower Djokovic doesn’t have the edge he used to have. That causes the rallies and the match to go longer, which further increases the risk of injury. Then comes the fact that his body is aging, and every day it’s simply less and less capable of meeting the demands he’s putting on it. That’s not something that will change anytime soon, which brings us to the main point of contention.
Novak Djokovic won’t win the 2025 French Open
As much as millions of his fans would like to see him do well at the upcoming French Open and possibly win it and further extend his Grand Slam record, Novak Djokovic is very unlikely to get it done. It’s quite close to impossible for him to win the event if we look at what has happened so far. His record in 2025 is 12-7, which at first glance looks pretty okay. It doesn’t jump off the page as either horrible or great, but rather fine. It doesn’t look as good when considering that seven of those 12 wins came in January.
It’s even worse when you consider that all those 12 wins came at three events: the Australian Open, Brisbane, and the Miami Masters. Now, you might think that Djokovic only played three events this year, but that’s the catch—he didn’t. He has played seven events, which means that he played at four events where he didn’t even win a single match. Those events were Doha, Indian Wells, Monte Carlo, and Rome. So, he didn’t manage to win a single match at half the events he attended this year, and two of the last ones he played also happened to be played on the same surface on which Roland Garros will be played.
That’s very bad news for the Serbian because he hasn’t looked great on clay so far this year. Why? Mostly because he is old. He is old, and he is slow, which means he’s not getting to the ball as quickly as he needs to to make the rallies and matches more competitive. He’s struggling with the basic tenets of what made him great on clay. He simply resembles a sitting duck out there, which is not good.
There are some ways Novak Djokovic might counter that, but he’s never been a big hitter who can hit through opponents, so it’s unlikely that it will happen today. And then we have the fact that more and more players can beat him and will beat him, and it just isn’t looking good. He’s trending downward, and the surface that will expose him as a vulnerable player the most right now is clay. That’s why he won’t win this event this year or any year in the future.
2023 was the last time Djokovic won Roland Garros. Remember it well.
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