Aussie Alex de Minaur has been forced to withdraw from his Wimbledon quarter-final with Novak Djokovic with a hip injury.
The 25-year-old made the heartbreaking decision an hour before he was scheduled to take the court.
His withdrawal means seven-time champion Djokovic is through to the semi-finals.
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A devastated de Minaur confirmed he couldn’t play and added that he could miss the Paris Olympics as well.
“Have to pull out due to a hip injury, a tear of the cartilage that connects to the adductors. I felt a crack during the last three points. Had a scan and it confirmed it was the injury with high risk of making it worse,” he said.
De Minaur suffered the hip injury while winning the final point of his fourth round match against Arthur Fils.
He pulled up as he secured a tense four-set victory over Fils, concluding with an angled stop volley at the net after a forehand set-up shot.
There were no celebrations from him, which may have been as he was simply relieved to win after blowing a two-set advantage at the same stage in 2022, but could also have been because he knew, in that instant, he was injured.
He walked stiffly to his chair, looking more like he’d lost than won the match, then sat deep in thought for a few minutes.
At the time he said, “I’ll be alright. I’ll find a way. You can count on me going out there, trying my hardest and playing my heart out.”
A few hours later he added, his hip was “a little bit ginger” but “it’s probably a little bit of a scare more than anything”.
As it happens Djokovic is still working back to full fitness himself after a knee operation on a torn meniscus barely a month ago.
However, his mobility has improved as the championships have gone on, as he confirmed after his last-16 win over Holger Rune.
“The knee has been really – knock on wood – really good. It did not react negatively to those few slips that I had today.
“I’ve been really experimenting (with movement) because of cautiousness because of the knee.
“The first couple rounds I was still not maybe willing to go on extreme balls and slide and make splits, but last few matches I’ve done it.”
Grand slams are gruelling and Wimbledon has the added factor of grasscourts. In a fortnight as damp as this they can get wet outdoors and slippy under the roof when the air becomes humid.
There have been several injury-related withdrawals and losses this Wimbledon, most notably from an Australian viewpoint that of Thanasi Kokkinakis against Lucas Pouille after a bad fall.
Pouille then quit before he even got on court against De Minaur.
In addition, Grigor Dimitrov, Hubert Hurkacz, Madison Keys and Anna Kalinskaya are among those to have quit during matches while Alexander Zverev was troubled by the impact of a previous fall in his fourth-round loss to Taylor Fritz.
– With AAP
