The first weekend of the Adria Tour, a series of exhibition mini-events organized by Novak Djokovic and his team in several countries of former Yugoslavia, ended with reports from the Serbian media that could cast a shadow over the rest of the competition.
According to various sources, Monday morning a Serbian basketball player from Partizan Belgrade, Nikola Jankovic, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Preliminary reports stated that Jankovic participated to the party at the “Lafayette Cuisine Cabared Club” in Belgrade on Sunday night where all the Adria Tour players, including Novak Djokovic, Dominic Thiem, Sascha Zverev and Grigor Dimitrov, danced the night away to celebrate the end of the first event. However, even if it is not confirmed that the Partizan athlete was at that party, he still had close contact with Novak Djokovic a few days earlier at an exhibition basketball game for the Serbian coach Dejan Milojevic who is leaving to work in the NBA.
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Jankovic took the test on Monday as part of a standard procedure for Serbian wishing to go on vacation to another country and he is reported to be asymptomatic. He will now be isolated and all his teammates will need to be tested.
At this stage, it is unclear whether Djokovic or any of the other tennis players participating in the Adria Tour is going to be tested or if the Tour itself has some health protocol to periodically check all players and staff. Social distancing rules in Serbia are very relaxed at the moment, as TV spectators around the world could see during the weekend when players competed in Belgrade in front of a packed crowd (over 10,000 tickets were sold during the 3-day event) and engaged in high-fives and group hugs, a very unfamiliar sight these days in most countries.
The Adria Tour is moving to Croatia next weekend where another event will be played in Zadar, a beach town on the Adriatic Sea approximately three-hours from the capital Zagreb. Ubitennis has learned from Croatian reporters that players may be tested at the airport once they reach Zadar coming from Belgrade, but Croatia is relying on this tennis event to show the world how the country is a safe place to be and beaches are open for business now that the tourist season is starting. Croatia has recorded only five new cases of COVID-19 in the last few weeks.
The tournament director for the Zadar event is former Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic, now part of Djokovic’s technical team, who has just spent the last 10 days in Belgrade. Ivanisevic has confirmed to Ubitennis that the tournament is going ahead as planned.
The Adria Tour is now looking to find a new location to hold its third tournament on 27-28 June, after a few days ago the Government of Montenegro, that was supposed to welcome the event, decided that Serbian residents are not allowed to enter the country due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic. A possible alternative could be the town of Portorose, in Slovenia, just a few kilometers from Umag, Croatia, that hosts an ATP 250 tournament every July.