Want to know how Novak Djokovic became seemingly so vulnerable to quackery of all kinds, and a poster boy for the anti-vaxx movement? You only have to read his autobiography, Serve To Win. This peculiar book is full of new-age jibber-jabber, with chapter titles such as “How Opening My Mind Changed My Body”. 

Here is an anti-scientific crank hiding in plain sight. Our personalities, they say, are formed by the stories we tell ourselves. So it is interesting to see how Djokovic’s frames his book. He mentions the NATO bombing raids on Belgrade during his childhood, which is invariably how TV documentaries about him begin. But these elements of the story are a sideshow beside the main thrust: how he suffered from recurring physical ailments – allergies, breathing difficulties, blocked sinuses – until he gave up gluten. 

Nothing especially weird so far – until he explains how his gluten intolerance was diagnosed. A Serbian nutritionist called Dr Igor Cetojevic asked Djokovic to hold his right arm out at right angles and resist the pressure as he pushed down on it. Then the exercise was repeated, only this time while Djokovic held a slice of bread against his stomach. “I was noticeably weaker,” writes Djokovic, who adds that “kinesiological arm testing [has] long been used as a diagnostic tool by natural healers.” Yes, and mediums have long claimed to speak to the dead. 

Suffice to say, this branch of alternative medicine – so-called “applied kinesiology” – remains largely unsupported by any scientific evidence. And that was only the start of the rabbit hole. “Growing up under communism, you are not taught to be open-minded,” Djokovic writes, a couple of pages later, before copying out a page of claptrap from traditional Chinese medicine. “Each organ in our bodies is undergoing repair in roughly this order: Lungs 3-5am, Large Intestine 5-7am, Stomach 7-9am …” You get the picture. 

Here is the new Novak. The seeker after truth. The lover of nature. Here is a man who broke up his visits to Wimbledon with trips to the nearby Buddhapadipa Temple to meditate by a lake. A man who revealed two years ago that he has a “friend” in Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens – “a Brazilian fig tree that I like to climb”. Yes, Djokovic’s jet-setting spiritualism might sound charming in itself. But its side-effect has been credulousness. 

Serve To Win describes a so-called “researcher” taking two glasses of water and directing loving energy towards one, while swearing angrily at the other. “After a few days … [the angry glass] was tinted slightly green … the other glass was still bright and crystal clear”. Harmless, perhaps, if deeply dippy. But then, last year, Djokovic could be found hosting a former estate agent called Chervin Jafarieh on his Instagram Live channel. Jafarieh was selling bottles of Advanced Brain Nutrients at $50 apiece, which – like Djokovic’s resistance to the Covid vaccination – sounded contrary to the interests of public health.