NEW YORK — What does it feel like to beat your greatest sporting idol? Mariano Navone, the Argentine player who eliminated Novak Djokovic from the US Open, admitted to feeling a tremendous rush of adrenaline.
“I had imagined it many times during the day — what if I beat him? What if I beat him? At some point you start to believe, to see him as a player rather than as the legend, and to fight for what you want. It is a beautiful feeling, an incredible adrenaline rush,” Navone said on Sunday, minutes after living the most special night of his career.
“It is something very crazy — imagine, I came from a very small town. Suddenly I was beating Djokovic in New York with, I don’t know how many people there were, around 15,000? The stadium applauding you — it is a feeling very hard to explain,” he said in conversation with Argentine journalist Enrique Cano of Infobae.
It was a very humid night in New York, where the Argentine pushed Djokovic to the limits of his body.
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Possibly the match in which the Serb felt the most physical distress of his entire career: dizziness, vomiting, cramps and pain. He was on the verge of collapse and yet still pushed to the maximum to take the match past four and a half hours. In the fifth set, he struggled to hold back tears.
The world No. 49 did not celebrate when he won the match. He did not express that adrenaline effusively. He congratulated the Serb and heaped praise on him. He then released his joy with his team at the side of the court, shouting and raising his arms. Some criticism came his way on social media for celebrating after beating an ailing opponent.
Such are the unexpected paths of sport: Navone had always felt a deep admiration for the Serb. When it became known they would meet in the opening round of the 2026 US Open, social media revived some of Navone’s tweets from ten years ago, showing him as the world No. 1’s biggest fan.
“The emperor Djokovic doing his thing”; “How incredible is Djokovic’s movement”; “Djokovic I love you even though you’re a man” — some of the Argentine’s public messages.
It was surely a mixture of feelings for Navone, but without doubt what prevailed was the personal satisfaction of achieving the most significant win of his career: against “the GOAT,” as he calls him, on one of tennis’s most important courts and in front of the entire world.
A reward too for his commitment to hard courts: with his coach, former player Alberto Mancini, he rewired his game and learned to play on cement. That led to his first title on the surface, at the Cap Cana Challenger 175 in the Dominican Republic.
Mancini had been telling him to attack, to go after the match even with Djokovic struggling.
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Navone’s story is that of a kid who sacrificed a great deal to get where he is — who started travelling on the back of small local sponsors, who strung his own rackets, and who in his early teens had to travel five hours each way to his training centre.
The Argentine is grateful for what tennis gives him. “People pay to watch us! It is incredible!” he told CLAY in an interview.
Does John McEnroe know any of that? The former world No. 1 dismissed him from a television booth.
“You will play your second round on Court 21 — we wish you the best.”
