Originally published 2021-07-04.
Novak Djokovic was eleven, turning twelve, when NATO began bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in March 1999. For the next 78 days he lived in Belgrade with his grandfather while his parents worked elsewhere, spending nights in a crowded basement shelter and training by day wherever it seemed safe. Looking back in a 2019 BBC interview, he said the experience made him and his generation tougher and hungrier to succeed.
Here is what he has said about those months, how they fit into the wider history of the Kosovo war, and how a boy who started tennis long before the bombing went on to become one of the most successful players of all time.
Why NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999
The bombing was part of the Kosovo war. Through 1998, Yugoslav and Serbian forces fought the Kosovo Liberation Army in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia with an ethnic Albanian majority. Security forces carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovar Albanians, driving many from their homes and across borders. A ceasefire agreed in October 1998 collapsed within weeks, and in January 1999 the killing of 45 Kosovar Albanians at Račak drew international outrage.
After Yugoslavia rejected the Rambouillet peace proposals, NATO began air strikes on 24 March 1999 without authorisation from the UN Security Council, describing the operation as a humanitarian intervention. The campaign lasted until 10 June. It ended with the Kumanovo Agreement, the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, UN Security Council Resolution 1244 and the arrival of the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force. Slobodan Milošević remained in power until he was ousted after disputed elections in October 2000.
The cost to civilians was serious on every side. Human Rights Watch concluded that between 489 and 528 Yugoslav civilians were killed by NATO strikes. In Belgrade, targets included government buildings, bridges and the headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia, where sixteen employees died; the Chinese embassy was also hit, which NATO called a mistake.
Djokovic's memories of the basement
Djokovic has described the basement of his grandfather's building as the place where the family practically lived during the campaign. Neighbours who could fit came down too. For around two and a half months, he said, they were woken every night in the early hours by air-raid sirens and explosions.
Speaking to the BBC, he summed up what he took from it: “In a way these experiences made me a champion, it made us tougher, made us more hungry for success.”
It is worth reading that as a personal reflection rather than a general rule. Many children who live through bombing carry lasting trauma, and Djokovic himself has said it was a frightening time. His account describes how he chose to make sense of it.
Tennis started earlier than many retellings say
Some versions of this story claim that Djokovic first picked up a racket just after the bombing. That is not correct. He was born in Belgrade on 22 May 1987 and began playing at about four, when his parents gave him a mini racket and a foam ball. At six, at a summer camp on Mount Kopaonik in the early 1990s, he was spotted by Jelena Genčić, a former player and renowned coach who had worked with Monica Seles.
Genčić coached him for about six years. She taught him his two-handed backhand and also introduced him to classical music, poetry and languages, encouraging him to visualise his shots while listening to Tchaikovsky. During the bombing, their sessions were repeatedly interrupted, and they moved between training sites depending on where bombs had fallen the night before, reasoning that the same area was unlikely to be hit two days running. At one point he practised in a disused swimming pool converted into a court.
The BBC also spoke to Bogdan Obradović, later Serbia's Davis Cup captain and a member of the Serbian parliament, who said he worked with Djokovic as a boy and was struck by how prepared he arrived: warmed up, with water, a towel and a banana.
In September 1999, three months after the bombing ended, Genčić recommended that he move to Niki Pilić's academy near Munich, where he spent four years. Pilić later helped arrange his first professional wildcard.
From Belgrade to the top of the game
Djokovic's results since then have been extraordinary. He has won a record 24 Grand Slam singles titles, including seven at Wimbledon, and has spent a record 428 weeks ranked world No. 1. In 2024 he added the one major prize that had eluded him, the Olympic singles gold medal in Paris.
When this article was first published in early July 2021, he was chasing a third straight Wimbledon title. A week later he beat Matteo Berrettini in the final, his sixth Wimbledon and 20th Grand Slam, drawing level at the time with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
A national hero, and a bridge-builder
In Serbia, Djokovic is the country's most celebrated sportsman, and murals of him decorate his old Belgrade neighbourhood. Sport Klub journalist Saša Ozmo told the BBC that his influence runs in two directions, outward to the world and within the region. Ozmo pointed to Djokovic's public support for Croatia's national football team, despite lingering resentment from the wars of the 1990s, and called him a role model who is “really good at that responsibility.”
That willingness to cross old lines does not please everyone at home, but it reflects something many people from the former Yugoslavia share: a wish for the next generation to grow up without the fear their parents knew.
Reading his story alongside history
Djokovic's memories are one child's experience of one city during a complex conflict. They help explain his drive and his sense of identity, but they are not a full history of the Kosovo war. Kosovar Albanians endured mass expulsions and killings in 1998 and 1999, and Serbian civilians lived under the bombing. Holding both truths at once is the fairest way to understand what that spring meant to the people who lived through it.
For tennis fans, the lesson is easier to state. Champions are shaped by talent, coaching and countless hours of practice, and sometimes by hardship that would have broken others. A boy who trained between air raids became the most decorated player in the history of men's tennis.
Sources: BBC Sport, 2019 (original interviews); Wikipedia: NATO bombing of Yugoslavia; Wikipedia: Novak Djokovic; Wikipedia: Jelena Genčić; Wikipedia: Bogdan Obradović.
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