Novak Djokovic has reacted to
Holger Rune taking his former locker room at the Rolex
Shanghai Masters.
The World No. 5 revealed that he had been given a locker room at the ATP 1000 tournament that had only previously been assigned to Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. Rune is making his debut at the Shanghai Masters after COVID-19 restrictions meant that the Tour was not able to compete in China in recent years.
Almost all of the Top-10-ranked players are present at the event but Djokovic, who has won three out of four Grand Slam titles this year, decided to skip the tournament.
Djokovic jokes that Rune stole his locker room
Rune posted a video of the locker room on X, formerly known as Twitter, with the caption, "How cool is this locker room." In response, Djokovic jokingly wrote, "You stole my locker room!??"
Hopefully being in a room of former champions will act as extra motivation for the Dane, who has been having a difficult time recently on the ATP Tour. He has been dealing with a back injury for several months which forced him to retire from his first-round match at the Cincinnati Open in August and from one of his matches at the Davis Cup last month.
He has been keeping fans updated with videos of training but suffered an early exit at last week's China Open. Rune successfully ousted Felix Auger-Aliassime 6-4, 6-4 but was eliminated in the second round by Grigor Dimitrov.
After his defeat in Beijing, Rune opened up on his mindset heading into the tournament in Shanghai.
"I mean, always have hopes to go all the way.
"I mean, I think all the players have that. That's why they come. I got to take one match at a time. In my mind, try to see more on my game rather than the result because my game is not very good right now. I need to get back and then start improving.
"I got to focus more on that, then the results will be better and better. Now it's like I played very solid in the first match here, but then less solid today. Like, you want to see the improvement from every match. I guess that's going to be my focus next week," he said.