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The Swiss has held aloft the gilded Challenge
Cup a record eight times. But equally memorably, he lost a
chance to win a ninth title in 2019 when he astonishingly failed
to convert two championship points against Novak Djokovic.
That near-miss prevented him from winning a record-extending
21st Grand Slam title, and since then a combination of injuries
and the COVID-19 pandemic have conspired to curtail his on-court
action.
When Wimbledon's favourite son walks out on the manicured lawns
next week, he will be hoping his surgically repaired knees can
deal with the rigours of winning seven best-of-five-set matches.
Exactly how Federer, who turns 40 in August, will be able to
cope with such demands on his body is something that even he
does not know because since that fifth-set tiebreak loss to
Djokovic in July 2019, he has played only 34 matches, including
just eight since February 2020.
Before injuries started disrupting his career from 2016, Federer
regularly contested more than 70 matches a year.
"It’s a huge challenge for me. Everybody who has multiple
surgeries or a tough surgery knows what I’m talking about,” said
Federer, who had left knee surgery in 2016 on a torn meniscus
before going under the knife twice in 2020 on his right knee.
"Things don’t come easy. You second-guess yourself... and that’s
sometimes the biggest worry: the worry of pain or the worry of
how you’re going to feel the next day or when you wake up.
"All this stuff, it takes a little bit of a toll on you
sometimes."
His lack of match-fitness will be severely tested not only by
the Djokovics of this world -- who incidentally will be eager to
flatten anyone who tries to stop him from joining Federer and
Rafael Nadal on 20 majors -- but also by an army of younger and
fitter players.
The likes of 20-somethings Stefanos Tsitsipas and Alexander
Zverev no longer fear facing Federer and have beaten the Swiss
great on multiple occasions.
Federer has made no secret that at this stage of his career,
anything he does or does not do on a tennis court is done with
the sole purpose of making sure he is in the best shape possible
to make another title run at Wimbledon.
With that in mind, he quit the French Open after winning his
third-round match. It was a move that annoyed many critics who
felt that if anyone else had pulled out to protect their body,
they would have been crucified for using another Grand Slam
tournament as a dress rehearsal.
Others rushed to defend the world number eight.
"Roger has earned the right to do anything he wants in tennis
right now,” American great Chris Evert said.
"Wimbledon is his dream, that’s the golden tournament for him.
He should be excused for any withdrawal he has."
Fellow ESPN analyst John McEnroe said the bigger concern was
that: "He played a four-hour match, won that, then defaulted.
It's hard to say how he was feeling that next day, if he could
have gone on?"
Fast forward a few days and a second round defeat on grass in
Halle, the earliest exit Federer has suffered in 18 appearances
at the Wimbledon-warm up event he has won 10 times, was a
further setback caused by what the Swiss described as a
"negative attitude".
However, with his focus clearly on equalling Martina
Navratilova's overall record of nine Wimbledon titles, as
Eurosport pundit Mats Wilander put it: "He'll be as fired up as
the Rolling Stones playing at Wembley."
(Reporting by Pritha Sarkar, additional reporting by Frank
Pingue and Martyn Herman, editing by Hugh Lawson)
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