Novak Djokovic, the world’s best tennis player, is also likely the world’s dumbest tennis player. If you haven’t been paying attention to the tennis world lately (we don’t blame you), you likely haven’t heard that Djokovic started a series of charity tennis tournaments out in Croatia and Serbia known as the “Adria Tour”. Features of the Adria Tour include: top players, fanfare, afterparties, and an authentic tennis match experience that fans are accustomed to. Notably missing from the Adria Tour: Any remote kind of social distancing in any way, attendees wearing masks, and a general sense of concern about the fact that there’s an ongoing global pandemic that’s killing people. Seems like a fun time, right? What could go wrong?
If you guessed “Two top players tested positive for Covid-19 right after playing their matches and partying with tons of people”, you’d not only pick the most obvious choice, but the correct one! World Ranked #19 Gregor Dimitrov and Rank #33 Borna Coric announced that they had tested positive and the finals were pretty much immediately cancelled. On top of that, as of the writing, Djokovic hasn’t even been tested yet. This is reportedly because he’s experiencing no symptoms, so in his mind everything is totally okay and he’s free to go about his life. He apparently believes in some pretty wacky pseudo-science, so this actually makes a lot of sense:
Stunned that someone with such a scientific background as Novak Djokovic would stage a tennis tournament that became the sport equivalent of a chicken pox party. This is his theory on how to purify water pic.twitter.com/hHbh5XrFSl
— Ben Isaacs 🚨NFLhistorybook.com🚨 (@tweetsfromben) June 22, 2020
Regardless of what happens after this, the whole thing has been a pretty stark reminder that the pandemic is very much still a thing. People flew in from different countries to see this event, so who knows what kind of damage this could cause if people are allowed to go home with no issue. For as bad as the US has handled this whole thing, at least we’re not this dumb. Right?
