Serbian tennis player. He first picked up a racket at the age of four and left Serbia at 12 for a tennis academy in Germany. He won his first major title—the 2008 Australian Open—at 20. He has 24 major titles and has spent more time ranked number one in the world than any other player.
In early 2026 Djokovic came out publicly against Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia's president, joining a large proportion of the country's academic, cultural and sports elite who backed the student-led protest movement.
A study published in Science by Arne Güllich, a sports scientist at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, covering more than 34,000 elite performers across sport, chess, classical music and academia, found that around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children—making Mr Djokovic, who was intensively drilled from his early years, something of an exception rather than the rule.
If rabbits' feet are so lucky, what happened to the rabbit?