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The 2022 Australian Open should, and largely will, be remembered for the on-court action.

Ash Barty became the first Australian woman to win her home Grand Slam since 1978, the men’s doubles final was an all-Ozzie affair won by Nick Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis, and Rafa Nadal pulled off one of the great sporting comebacks of all-time.

Of course, before a ball was even hit the biggest story was the Novak Djokovic saga. The end result was that Djokovic was excluded from the tournament and sent home and we tried to move on from the subject.

Except here we are again and now doubts are being cast on the timing of the Serb’s positive COVID-19 test in December.

Djokovic used the positive test to enter Australia to try to compete in the Australian Open, with the results provided to authorities to exempt him from rules barring unvaccinated people.

The BBC reports:

However, the serial number on his test on 16 December appears out of sequence with a sample of tests from Serbia over this period gathered by the BBC.

It is also higher than for his second (negative) test result from six days later.

Image: BBC

Documents submitted by his lawyers to federal court in Australia included two Covid (PCR) test certificates, one with a positive result on 16 December and one with a negative result on 22 December.

Investigative reporters for the BBC dug around to check whether these numbers are generated in strict chronological order.

You know what they found:

The confirmation codes in all cases slotted into the same chronological timeline as our initial batch sent by BBC colleagues and showed that the earlier the test result date, the lower the confirmation code.

The only outlier of all the confirmation codes we’ve plotted was Mr Djokovic’s positive test on 16 December.

Read the full BBC report and methodology here.

Neither Djokovic nor the Serbian government has chosen to comment but that’s never going to be the case with John McEnroe.

Via Fox Sports, he said clarity is needed:

“In short, yes. I’d like to know.

“I’ll give you an example of something I don’t understand. Novak Djokovic, to me, is an extremely smart person. If he tested positive on – what date is it? – December 15th – I’m throwing in a date – why in the hell would he do an interview with a journalist on December 16th?

“That makes absolutely no sense to me. The guy’s not stupid. He’s smart. So, already, I’m like, ‘What?!’

“I mean, he wasn’t just sitting around going, ‘I hope I get Covid so I can get an exemption’. So that wasn’t happening.”

The former tennis pro also stated that he doubts Serbian authorities would investigate the matter themselves.

I’d say he has a point.

Until this anomaly is effectively explained, questions will continue to be asked of Djokovic’s honesty in trying for that exemption from Australia’s vaccine rules.

[sources:bbc&foxsports]