Covid, gurus, pyramids… Novak Djokovic, science on the wrong foot

Novak Djokovic or “Novax Djocovid”. Detained for five days at the Park Hotel in Carlton, a detention center in the suburbs of Melbourne, after the cancellation of his visa by the Australian government, the Serb was released on Monday 10 January. Convinced of the good faith of “Nole”, the federal judge Anthony Kelly, in charge of the case, estimated “unreasonable” the refusal of the authorities to grant him a pass, while the world number 1, not vaccinated against Covid-19, had benefited from a medical exemption to enter Australia, on the grounds of a positive test, dated 16 last December.

Now free, “Djoko” is not out of business. He remains, in fact, under the threat of expulsion. In antivax circles, his fight with the Australian authorities earned him the admiration of “Covido-skeptics”. Because, in the background of this politico-sporting imbroglio, it is a question of the pressure exerted on the non-vaccinated, embodied here by Novak Djokovic. A martyr figure exploited by Srdjan Djokovic, believing that his son was “crucified”… like Jesus. “Novak will become a symbol and a leader of the free world, the leader of poor and oppressed countries and peoples”, he also said. “Today they can throw him in a dungeon, tomorrow they can chain him. Novak is the Spartacus of a new world.”

Antivax ambiguous, failing to fully assume it, Novak Djokovic expressed his doubts about the vaccine. As early as April 2020, he explained in a Facebook Live to be “personally” “opposed to vaccination”. “I wouldn’t want to be forced by someone to get vaccinated in order to be fit to travel”, he said, saying he had “(his) own opinion on the matter” and not know “if it will change, at some point”. Shortly after, he developed his point. “I am not an expert but I want to be able to choose what is best for my body. I keep an open mind”, he wrote to New York Times.

A position he has since repeated, taking care never to reveal his vaccination status. At least, until his arrival on January 5 at Melbourne airport and the politico-sports saga that followed. A new hole in the racket of the Serb. Because, if this time the affair agitated the small world of tennis, it is not the first time that his convictions are disconcerting. And for good reason, long before the Covid, the organizer of the Adria Tour, a series of exhibitions in the Balkans, which had turned into an open-air cluster in the summer of 2020, has always had a special relationship with science. “Let’s not lose sight of how publicly anti-science Djokovic has been for years”, recalled on Twitter Ben Rothenberg of the New York Times.

“He was preaching about how you can change water emotionally”, added the tennis journalist. In the spring of 2020, in an Instagram Live with “wellness guru” Chervin Jafarieh, Djokovic echoed an obscure theory. “I have seen and I know people capable, through energetic transformations, through the power of prayer, of transforming the most toxic food or the most polluted water into the purest water”, he advanced. “Because water reacts to our emotions.” He claimed that “scientists have shown that the molecules present in water react to our emotions, to what is said”. A far-fetched doctrine that the follower of telekinesis and telepathy exposed in front of nearly half a million people.

This appetite for the incongruous, where the unreal rubs shoulders with the grotesque, accompanies the Serb outside the courts. A sympathizer of anthroposophy, a pseudo-scientific, esoteric and philosophical current initiated by the Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner, in which antivax theories have largely infused, the world number 1 stands out with its methods of preparation and recovery. After having become friends for a while with Pepe Imaz, a mental trainer who had the reputation of being a guru advocating “love” and “the peace”, “Nole” has since made pilgrimages to a controversial “pyramid park” in Bosnia.

In July 2020, after being infected with SARS-CoV-2 for the first time, he came “recharge” on this wooded hill overlooking the village of Visoko, near Sarajevo, where the guru Semir Osmanagic has been living since 2005. This defender of conspiracy theories on the virus thrives in this place, the fruit of a civilization “technologically superior”, despite the disavowal of geologists and archaeologists, denouncing a “imposture”. “If there is heaven on Earth, then it is here”, declared on this occasion Novak Djokovic, who praised the effects “beneficial” of its “energy tunnels”. Among others on the Covid-19.